Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language and Education: A Limpopo Lens 557
majority/dominant ones, about vernacular as well as literary genres and
styles, and about contextualized meanings and texts as much as decontextualized
ones.
If we are to welcome the cultures, communities and identities of our
students in our classrooms, we must begin by understanding that they are
socially constructed and ever-changing categories, rather than intrinsic
and immutable ones. Identities are multiple, nonunitary, changing over
time, and importantly, sites of struggle (Norton); cultural identities are
something people do rather than something they have (Kasper & Omori);
gendered identities are discursively negotiated, assimilated or resisted
(Higgins); ethnic identities are not simply brought to school, but emergent
through classroom practice and sometimes strategically displayed, perhaps
by enacting a stereotype or by crossing into language varieties associated
with an ethnic other (Reyes); language users employ styles and
styling nonstop ‘to (re)build their social surroundings as well as the self-
and other-identities that are part of it’ ( Jaspers); communities may be
imagined (Norton, McKay) or constructed through practice (Higgins,
Kubota, Pennycook, Street & Leung). These recognitions of culture, identity
and community as emergent and mutable have/do not necessarily
come easily in the language teaching disciplines: research and practice in
contrastive rhetoric has been criticized for its prescriptive pedagogy and
essentialist characterization of the Other (Kubota), while a tendency
toward Othering discourses regarding approaches to knowledge and
learning styles has also been evident in the implementation of communicative
English language teaching in Outer and Expanding Circle countries
(McKay), and even culturally responsive pedagogy and multicultural
education are susceptible to a conception of culture as a static corpus of
values and beliefs, and a confl ation of country, culture, language, nationality
and identity, accompanied by a tendency to position students from
immigrant backgrounds as representatives of their culture and community
of origin (Kasper & Omori).
On the other hand, when teachers stretch their classroom practices to
allow for students’ emergent identity negotiation, language styling and
mixing, and mediation between popular culture and offi cial curriculum,
that is, when they ‘play along, this stretching could be mutually enjoyable
and lead to high amounts of on-task activity’ ( Jaspers). Jaspers describes
such a case in a working class secondary school in Antwerp, Belgium,
where both Moroccan ethnic minority students and working class Dutchspeaking
students regularly engaged in a practice which they called ‘doing
ridiculous’, slowing down the lesson in not entirely unruly ways, sometimes
stylizing Standard Dutch or Antwerp dialect to evoke varying identities
for varying effects. Some teachers managed to play along, enabling
the lesson to move forward in productive ways, though perhaps not as
originally planned. Rymes points out that accommodation to the