Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language and Education: A Limpopo Lens 555
African English, Afrikaans and local varieties of Sepedi (e.g. Kilobedu
variety discussed in CELS 202 class, 6 August, 2008), but also other South
African languages spoken locally – especially Venda and Tsonga, foreign
languages accessible through the internet and other technologies, as well
as Indian English and occasional words and phrases of Hindi, Tamil,
Kannada and colloquial Hindustani spoken by Ramani and Joseph, who
transplanted themselves from their native India to South Africa in the
early 1990s to teach at the Universities of Witwatersrand and Natal, respectively.
In terms of the media continua of biliteracy, then, these learners and
their teachers are making simultaneous use of structures and scripts
ranged along continua from similar to dissimilar and convergent to divergent,
as well as of a rich repertoire of styles, registers, modes and modalities,
all comprising what Hymes, in the ethnography of communication,
referred to as the instrumentalities of communication. The fl ow and fl uidity
of languages in the classroom refl ect but also expand local multilingual
communicative practices.
In myriad and marvelous ways, the authors herein call into question
the notion of separate and enumerable languages (Pennycook), adopting
instead a view of language – and literacy – as social practice, both in and
out of school (Norton, Kasper & Omori, Street & Leung). Although the
undeniable existence and imposition of standards (McKay), norms for literacy
(McGroarty), prescriptive rhetorical patterns (Kubota), correctness
in language teaching (Sidnell), and even the privileging of certain academic
literacies (Street & Leung) are premised on notions of language as
bounded entity, of ‘fi xity’ as Pennycook puts it, actual language use continually
leaks around the edges, indeed fl ows (Pennycook) and overfl ows,
as shown in the rich array of communicative hybridity and creativity portrayed
within these chapters. The recognition of classroom codeswitching
as a communicative resource (Kamwangamalu, McGroarty, Reyes), of
pidgins/creoles (Siegel) and Ebonics (Alim, Reyes) as rule-governed varieties
along a continuum of similarity/dissimilarity with standard varieties,
of styles, styling and stylizations ( Jaspers, Reyes) as social actions and
performances, of correctness as secondary to communicative goals
whether in one’s fi rst (Rymes) or second (Sidnell) language are all ways of
acknowledging the fl uidity and fl exibility of language in use.
Vaish and Towndrow discuss transformation, transduction and resemiotization
in multimodal design, referring to the shifting meaning of semiotic
signs within modes, across modes and across contexts, respectively.
Janks provides numerous illustrative examples of multilingual and multimodal
critical literacy pedagogies in South Africa and elsewhere that draw
students’ attention to and capitalize on the fl uidity of language and of
‘meaning-making in an age of the visual sign’, from activities on multilingualism
in her own Critical Language Awareness Series that seek to ‘destabilize
both a unitary and a normative view of English’, to multilingual,