Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

18 Part 1: Language and Ideology
of the 1960s and 1970s. Just as the growing capabilities of computers facilitated
the large-scale analyses required for attitudinal research and corpus
linguistics, the wider availability of audio and, later, video recording technology
gave investigators unprecedented access to enormous amounts of
talk in many settings, classrooms included. Classroom discourse has been
and remains a major focus for scholars from many academic traditions
and fi elds (see Rymes, this volume). In the United States, some of this earlier
work took a more quantitative approach in which utterances of teachers
(and, to a smaller extent, students) were tallied, and the tallies then
interpreted to identify principal types of linguistic actions, or moves (see
Bellack et al., 1966). Other North American work had a more qualitative
character, in which excerpts from ongoing teacher–student interactions
were selected to illustrate some aspect of interest such as teachers’
approaches to promoting students’ responses or labeling alternatives
during questioning (e.g. Cazden et al. 1972). Similarly, research in the
United Kingdom was from these early days focused on identifying the
superordinate patterns of discourse functions that related to pedagogical
aims and activities (Edwards & Furlong, 1978; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975).
In the intervening decades, qualitative work on classroom discourse has
been further enriched by ethnographic research that has included longterm
involvement in and analysis of classroom experiences (e.g. Heath,
1983), often conducted through participant observation. All such research
was, thus, descriptive in orientation, although it was often carried out to
serve the goal, sometimes implicit, of identifying classroom processes in
order to improve learning and instruction.
The descriptive goal of research into classroom interaction remains
robust, with investigators examining classroom discourse to identify questions
of perennial relevance, for example, patterns of teacher correction
(Santagata, 2004), teacher ability to build on student comments for effective
impromptu content-area instruction ( Jurow & Creighton, 2005) and a
host of other pedagogical concerns. Some current research on classroom
interaction, often but not only the work done within a critical discourse
analysis framework (see the contributions of Alim, Janks, Pennycook and
Rymes, this volume), explicitly addresses various aspects of language ideologies,
generally by examining the interaction patterns and/or related
linguistic and lexical choices and inferring ideological stances from these.
In many such studies, language ideologies are foregrounded through
the interpretive lenses applied as well as the choice of classroom types,
episodes and artifacts analyzed.
Interactions around norms for literacy
Classroom instruction and interaction related to the nature and choice of
language norms have proven to be productive sites for ideologically