Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language and Education: A Limpopo Lens 551
as media of instruction in the classroom, in keeping with local multilingual
practices. The curricular content draws not only on academic scholarship
but also on students’ lived experiences and identities. Finally, and
perhaps most importantly, the teacher’s classroom practices create a space
of awareness and acceptance of, and access to, a wide communicative –
and academic – repertoire for the students.
The Limpopo class and program are – in my way of thinking and
the founders’ and participants’ as well – instances of biliteracy ‘in which
communication occurs in two (or more) languages in and around writing’
(Hornberger, 1990: 213; see also Hornberger, 1989, 2003; Hornberger
& Skilton-Sylvester, 2000). The multilingual language contact
(Kamwangamalu 2 ), fl uid language use (Pennycook), locally grounded
multimodal pedagogies ( Janks) and socially sensitive pedagogy (McKay)
that infuse and inform the CEMS program instantiate the multiple and
complex interrelationships between language and literacy that the continua
of biliteracy framework represents – as to context, media, content and
development of biliteracy, respectively.
The work of the program offers confi rmation of the principle that the
more their learning contexts allow learners to draw on all points of the
continua, the greater are the chances for their full biliterate development
(Hornberger, 1989: 289). An analysis of the teaching and learning there,
through the lens of the continua of biliteracy, suggests that, for these
bilingual learners, the development of biliteracy indeed occurs ‘along intersecting
fi rst language–second language, receptive–productive, and oral–
written language skills continua; through the medium of two (or more)
languages and literacies whose linguistic structures vary from similar to
dissimilar, whose scripts range from convergent to divergent, and to which
the developing biliterate individual’s exposure varies from simultaneous
to successive; in contexts that encompass micro to macro levels and
are characterized by varying mixes along the monolingual–bilingual
and oral–literate continua; and ... with content that ranges from majority
to minority perspectives and experiences, literary to vernacular styles
and genres, and decontextualized to contextualized language texts’
(Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester, 2000: 96). Crucially, the program’s
founders have taken care to contest the traditional power weighting of the
continua toward decontextualized monolingual English-only instruction
by paying attention to what have traditionally been the less powerful ends
of the continua, emphasizing contextualized multilingual instruction
grounded in the students’ local experience and thereby empowering them
in their academic studies.
The present volume recounts many such instances of critically aware
and empowering language education and language use in education,
alongside theoretical and empirical explorations of the rationale and outcomes
of such instances. Herein, we use the terms language, language variety