Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

446 Part 5: Language and Identity
and certain key speech events work, at the level of grammar or genre/
register, for example, would assist those students who cannot easily induce
such content or conventions on their own. Similarly, students coming from
other cultures may not understand the basic routines in a classroom, such
as how to greet the teacher, how to get turns to speak during class discussions
or how to take part in reading circle activities or online discussions.
Finally, in many diaspora and postcolonial contexts, language socialization
is a very complicated multilingual, multimodal process that may
require competence in more than one cultural, linguistic and discursive
system at one time or sequentially, and ultimately in the language of power,
the dominant or superordinate language in diglossic situations. Teachers
and policy-makers must remember that what is very obvious to them after
a lifetime of language and literacy socialization and professional education
into the dominant discourses of society may be not at all obvious or
even comprehensible to newcomers (e.g. Campbell & Roberts, 2007). Time,
careful language planning, modeling, instruction, feedback and guided
participation, and bilingual schooling or codeswitching in some contexts,
may all prove necessary (Guardado, 2009). Of course, students may not in
the end assimilate to the local norms, for various reasons, and perhaps they
should not be expected to do so either in every respect (Kramsch, 2002).
They may develop innovative hybrid forms of involvement, and hybrid
identities and values instead, a cross-fertilization that may ultimately have
an impact on the new community and on its other members too.
Siegal’s (1994) dissertation reported that the Western women in her study
learning Japanese in Japan often eschewed the formal, highly feminized
and honorifi c forms of language that high-profi ciency students of Japanese
or native speakers would normally be expected to master for professional or
public interactions. The women in her study felt that beyond the grammatical
or morphological diffi culty of such forms, or the complexity of understanding
in which contexts and with which interlocutors to use which forms,
accepting those speech forms would not be consistent with their personal
ideologies and identities as strong, independent Western women. They
therefore resisted those forms of socialization and what they stood for.
Students may also learn and relearn languages in sequences that prove
highly variable, unpredictable and nonlinear: starting with a heritage (native
or ancestral) language spoken in the home; then often shifting to the dominant
societal language with public schooling; later adding an additional
(‘foreign’) language at school, and subsequently returning to a study of the
heritage language if well disposed to recultivating the latent knowledge
and building upon it (e.g. He, 2008). Such sequences, codeswitching, and
functional multilingualism are pervasive in much of the world.
Teachers must also have a good understanding of the language/literacy
practices students will need when they depart from language programs
and enter mainstream academic content classes or move from mainstream