Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

20 Part 1: Language and Ideology
indicated awareness that there were several dialects of English, each
appropriate for a specifi c context, and that optimal grammar instruction
and practice should be dialogic, positioning learners as skilled language
users. Hence, importantly, the ideological content animating these activities,
when considered holistically, showed some internal tensions and
contradictions. While the ‘prescriptive’ thrust was stronger, there was
nonetheless an undercurrent that acknowledged the contextually and situationally
bound nature of the choice of appropriate language forms and
student capabilities to recognize and display such knowledge.
Another project highlighting ideological infl uences on demonstration
of student knowledge about language is reported by Razfar (2005), who
studied the repair practices observed in two classes serving English language
learning (ELL) students in a Midwestern high school in the United
States. This year-long case study combined participant observation, video
recordings, teacher interviews and student surveys. In analysis of the
video data, the researcher paid special attention to the evidence for language
ideologies, or orientations toward authoritative language use,
revealed by either the explicit articulations regarding language use or the
language practices of teachers and students refl ecting their co-constructed
judgments about the accuracy and correctness of one form versus another.
Interestingly, the majority of repairs related to pronunciation. The nature
of the exchanges showed that the teachers in general viewed themselves,
and were viewed by the students, as arbiters of acceptable pronunciation
in English. However, when words of non-English origin were encountered,
a regular but not frequent event, teachers were receptive to public
input from students who spoke the indicated language. In these classrooms,
teachers were highly likely to repair public use of non-standard
forms such as ain’t, and might do so in a mocking manner, evidence that
they realized students were, in fact, well aware that this form was considered
inappropriate but apparently believing that it should not go uncorrected.
Analysis of peer-editing activities showed that students engaged
in other correction (pointing out, e.g. that childrens was not a standard
plural without giving a reason), also demonstrating an orientation to preference
for a single standard form in language. Hence, both comments and
classroom processes, taken together, reinforced the notion that a unitary
standard for English existed, that the teacher was legitimately positioned
to monitor it and students were to follow that model, except in the rare
cases where their own language capabilities might confer linguistic
authority on them.
A third related investigation was done in a settlement near Cape Town,
South Africa, in an extremely diverse school community struggling to help
students make progress in a fast-changing context where knowledge of
English was becoming ever more vital to hopes of educational progress,
although it was the mother tongue for a very small number (Blommaert
et al., 2005). Researchers used a variety of ethnographic and qualitative