Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

562 Part 7: Language and Education
applications. Street, who teaches in the program and also documents it
ethnographically, refl ects on the intent of the programme to ‘challenge
some of the expectations students may have met at school ... about language
as narrowly defi ned ... The course involves issues of discourse,
genre, writing as social process ... within a notion of building on what
they already had and bring to the programme rather than treating them
as a defi cit and just fi xing that’. Like CEMS in Limpopo, ALLD enacts a
pedagogy of awareness, acceptance and access.
Lo Bianco (this volume) argues persuasively for an activity-centered
approach to LP, with teachers as central actors. ‘Public texts of policy are the
solidifi ed and already-decided form of language planning. Public debate is
the ongoing, discursive consideration of future LP. In their performance role
teachers enact past policy and make continuing LP in activities of language
development and socialisation’. Lo Bianco’s claim that teachers bring
authenticity, experience and immediacy to enacted LP takes us full circle
back to the Limpopo classroom scene which opened this chapter.
We have seen that CEMS was created in the ideological and implementational
space opened up in the New South Africa, an initiative in the context
of a nationwide effort to turn language ideologies and relations of
power toward social justice and equity. We have observed that, in pursuit
of this goal, CEMS classroom practices make fl uid and fl exible use of languages
as media of instruction, draw on both academic and identity
resources for texts, materials and curriculum, and foster critical awareness
and acceptance of students’ communicative repertoires, identities and
imagined communities. CEMS founders Ramani and Joseph, and their
colleagues, Modiba and now Tlowane, are indeed central actors in LP
from the bottom up (Hornberger, 1996), in the complete sense of Lo
Bianco’s activity-centered approach: interrogating and working in the
spaces opened up by public texts of South African policy, engaged in
ongoing debate and discursive consideration of LP with their students
and with colleagues at Limpopo, nationally, and internationally, and
enacting LP activities of language development and socialization on a
daily basis with their students.
The classroom scene which opened this chapter took place in ‘The
Book Club’, a long room lined with books and occupied at one end by a
seminar-style table covered with batik cloth. This is a space carved out
and created by Ramani and Joseph in the years before CEMS, to foster in
fi rst year University students a love and practice of reading ( Joseph &
Ramani, 2002), and which they and CEMS students have jealously guarded
since then. It is quite literally a space for cultivating multilingualism
and language learning, critical language awareness and multimodalities,
critical and academic literacies, empowered social identities and transformative
ideologies. Yet one more way in which these sociolinguistically