Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

544 Part 6: Language and Interaction
Through this kind of work, we can help students learn how they can
use their repertoires to, as Canagarajah puts it, ‘shuttle between communities,
and not to think of only joining a community’ Canagarajah (2007:
238). Such a goal is absolutely essential to become ‘culturally relevant
teachers’ (Ladson-Billings, 2004), to ‘create pride in cultural and linguistic
differences’ (Monzó & Rueda, 2009: 38), and for teachers and students,
more generally, to develop as culturally effective human beings.
Suggestions for further reading
Griffi n, S. (2004) I need people: Storytelling in a second-grade classroom. In
C. Ballenger (ed.) Regarding Children’s Words: Teacher Research on Language and
Literacy. New York: Teachers College Press.
This chapter, a modern-day follow up to Sarah Michael’s classic on narrative style
(see below), illustrates how a teacher puts discourse analysis to use in his own
classroom to understand different narrative styles during sharing time. Through
descriptions and transcripts of one student’s non-normative storytelling turns,
Griffi n illustrates how his own acceptance of initially disturbing and potentially
disruptive storytelling positively transformed ‘sharing time’ in his classroom.
Griffi n’s research as a classroom teacher illustrates how classroom discourse
analysis can promote metalinguistic awareness of communicative repertoires,
and, in turn, expand the communicative repertoires of all children in a classroom.
Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (eds) (2007) Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
This collection presents a new theoretical framework for applied linguistics and
individual chapters illustrate what this new framework might look like in practice
in a number of contexts. The framework outlines how language teaching could
benefi t by shifting the focus from linguistic distinctions invented by that discipline
to the complex communicative concerns of speakers themselves. The applications
of this framework then illustrate, in practical terms, how this approach can improve
practice by refocusing language education on the communicative resources needed
to traverse social boundaries and thrive in mulilingual/multicultural contexts.
Martin-Jones, M. and Saxena, M. (2003) Bilingual resources and ‘funds of knowledge’
for teaching and learning in multi-ethnic classrooms in Britain. In
A. Creese and P. Martin (eds) Multilingual Classroom Ecologies (pp. 61–76).
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
This chapter describes an ethnographic study of a classroom in Britain in which
multilingual classroom aides facilitate the use of multiple languages as resources for
learning. Focusing on three classroom assistants who use Panjabi and Urdu with
children, transcripts of classroom talk illustrate how both language and non-verbal
cues afford home school connections for multilingual primary school children.
Mehan, H. (1985) The Structure of Classroom Discourse. Handbook of Discourse
Analysis, Vol. 3: Discourse and Dialogue (pp. 119–131). London: Academic Press.
This chapter introduced the notion of ‘Initiation-Response-Evaluation’ as a routine
essential to competent classroom participation. Through transcripts of an elementary
school discussion, Mehan illustrates this pattern’s control over how talk
unfolds. Most radically, his analysis provides empirical evidence that becoming
successful as a learner in a classroom involves not only the mastery of content, but
also competence in socially normative verbal behavior.