Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

550 Part 7: Language and Education
they will over the course of the semester each observe, videotape,
and analyze the private speech of a 4-to-6-year-old child in their own
community.
As Michael and I step outside, we are immediately approached by a
broadly smiling young woman who turns out to be one of the fi rst
CEMS graduates, Mapelo Tlowane, who has caught sight of her professor
and comes over to greet him warmly. She reports she’s doing
well, her language consulting business started jointly with fellow
CEMS-graduate Thabo is picking up, and she’s recently had two job
interviews in the translation and communication fi eld. She glowingly
states she feels well-prepared and ready for whatever challenges this
work might bring, exuding a contagious enthusiasm and confi dence
that visibly light up the faces of the current CEMS students when
Michael invites her in to the class to greet them. After her brief visit of
a few minutes, the three students return to their academic task with
renewed energy and focus, and perhaps a strengthened conviction of
the value of language-oriented research and study. (Limpopo, August
5, 2008)
A postscript from Michael Joseph, a year later:
Mapelo (Tlowane) has joined us as a junior staff at the beginning of
2009. She is the fi rst teacher (within this fi rst ever bilingual degree)
who is a student from the Degree, and she has all the brimming enthusiasm,
confi dence and bilingual competence that such a course
needs.
CELS 302 has started with Finkie and Abram (whom you interviewed)
and 4 others presenting introspective data on egocentric speech ( just
today). As with all the previous 4 batches no one doubts the universality
of such speech or its cognitive function. They just fi nd it strange
that no one pointed out that such speech should have any special
value and could therefore be researched. Their journey into the readings
of Vygotsky, Piaget, Chomsky, Skinner is matched by their even
more unpredictable search for their research subject – a child between
4 and 6 years. It’s quite exciting for me as well, as their experiential
knowledge drawn from within their communities and language are
just not there in any of the great books, and I am always thrown into
the deep end of being a learner once more discovering their culture
and the great ideas in the literature, one unlocking the other. (Personal
communication, 28 July, 2009) 1
This classroom scene and postscript recapitulate the core themes of the
present volume. They bespeak a multilingual context in which policy,
ideology and relations of power are key. There is a fl uid and fl exible
(Blackledge & Creese, 2009; Creese & Blackledge, 2008) use of languages