Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

558 Part 7: Language and Education
communicative repertoires of one’s interlocutors is inevitable, but that it
can and should be bidirectional; it is not just that students are expected to
accommodate to school routines and repertoires, but that teachers must
accommodate as well: ‘when students’ native repertoires are recognized,
they begin to see themselves as academically capable – that is as capable
of expanding their repertoire’ (Rymes). Alim outlines a powerful set of
sociolinguistic and ethnographic pedagogical activities – including ‘Real
Talk’, ‘Language in My Life’ and ‘Hiphopography’ – that build on ‘linguistically
profi led and marginalized’ students’ communicative repertoires,
knowledge of popular culture and engagement with the Black
community to develop their critical awareness of sociolinguistic variation
and the systematicity of Black language, refl exive awareness and validation
of their own speech behavior, exploration of localized lexical usage in
peer culture and critical interrogation of linguistic profi ling and discrimination.
He argues that critical language awareness ‘has the potential to
help students and teachers abandon old, restrictive and repressive ways
of thinking about language and to resocialize them into new, expansive
and emancipatory ways of thinking about language and power’ – and
from there, to move from studying the relationships between language,
society and power – to changing them. What he describes is an approach
where ‘sociolinguistics, research, and pedagogy come together, a crucial
relationship that is about teaching towards a better world’ (Pennycook).
Awareness, Acceptance and Access: Development
of Biliteracy
‘The overall aim of the [CEMS] degree is to produce bilingual specialists,
who will play a key role in promoting the offi cial multilingual policy
of South Africa’. So reads the program description, setting forth an aim
that is reiterated in program posters and on a regular basis in classes as
well. One eye-catching poster, for example, poses and answers the
question:
What can I do with a BA CEMS degree? You can be – a Researcher,
a Media presenter, a Bilingual Teacher, a Language Consultant, a
Journalist, a Translator, an Interpreter, a Cultural Activist or Join any
Profession in Health, Education, Welfare, Tourism, that needs a
BILINGUAL EXPERT! (see Figure 20.1)
This aim is an expression of the social justice agenda that Ramani and
Joseph explicitly and eloquently articulate in their published writings, in
curricula and materials of the program, and in their daily discourse with
CEMS students. Situated in South Africa’s poorest province, in a historically
Black university where English has been the only language of instruction
and African languages and ways of knowing traditionally excluded,