Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

540 Part 6: Language and Interaction
Use these categories to begin investigating your own and your peers language use in the classroom:
Names/Nicknames What different names do you and your peers use for students and teachers?
Popular Culture References What pop cultural icons do students and teachers allude to?
Gestures What are some characteristic gestures students and teachers use?
Turn-taking habits Is highly overlapping speech common and expected? Are long pauses more
the norm?
Ways of telling stories What characteristic ways of telling stories do you and your peers have?
Languages in play What languages are in use? By whom?
Pronunciation of certain words Are different languages pronounced differently by different
people? Which are used/not used?
Figure 19.1 Categories for classroom communicative repertoire comparison
Gaining metalinguistic awareness
A critical goal of classroom discourse analysis then is to develop communicative
repertoires of our students and their awareness of their functionality
across contexts. As Canagarajah has emphasized, ‘We have to
develop the sensitivity to decode differences in dialects as students engage
with a range of speakers and communities. What would help in this venture
is the focus on developing a metalinguistic awareness’ (2007: 238). To
achieve the goal of increased metalinguistic awareness, I want to emphasize
the new critical territory opened up by the everyday practice of classroom
discourse analysis. When the goal is the achievement of greater
metalinguistic awareness, the process of doing classroom discourse analysis
can be as important as the fi ndings. Doing classroom discourse analysis
potentially develops new habits of meta-discursive refl ection in teachers
and students, habits that are critical in contemporary multilingual, everglobalizing
educational contexts.
What would this look like in practice? Teachers and students, by analyzing
discourse in their classroom and school, can begin to notice the
range of repertoires and their functional value. ‘Discourse Notebooks’, in
which teachers and students record and discuss language variation as
they hear it, can be a good starting place. Each page in the discourse notebook
can use the same kinds of categories illustrated in Figure 19.1, above,
with additional local categories being added as needed. Discussions of the
discourse notebooks are likely to lead to important metalinguistic insights
and directions for further investigation. Recording and transcribing key
events and then analyzing them as a class can add further detail and direction
to this project.