Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

44 THE IMPACT OF LANGUAGE VARIATIONnon-standard forms, sociolects, creoles, speech/writing differences, variation accordingto social situation (formality/informality etc.), gender and literary vs. non-literaryEnglish. This is by no means an exhaustive list.We assume that programme designers include these topics for good reasons.Possibly, they subscribe to the view of writers such as Llamas and Stockwell (2002:166),who assert that ‘teachers who are aware of the sociolinguistic context have insights attheir disposal which can make them better teachers’, or McKay and Hornberger(1996:ix), who claim that teachers need ‘an understanding of the relationship betweenlanguage and society’ in order to fulfil ‘the challenging task of respecting linguisticdiversity while promoting common standards’. It is more likely, however, that they areintuitively encouraged by the naturally high level of student-teacher interest in variation.What is the reason for this interest? Perhaps for the non-native speaker it is a matter ofgrowing confidence. When we first approach a foreign language, it stands before us as amonolith; we are not interested in, still less worried by, variation because all our energyis absorbed by saying anything at all. When we get much better, we need to master whatCampbell and Wales (1970) and Hymes (1970) so famously conceptualised asappropriateness, and the consensus is that this aspect of language is to a great extentculturally determined.What about the native-speaker student-teacher? Whereas the non-native is confrontedby cultural strangeness, the native-speaker student-teacher, immersed in native culture,needs to have the language made strange again, to borrow from Brecht (1951). Mostnative-speakers of any language are, almost inevitably, inculcated in childhood withlimited and limiting views about their native language. After many years of thinkingabout language sociolinguistically, the specialist may find it hard to recapture that firstenthusiasm at the most trivial of discoveries in the domain of variation; but, if we canmanage that, then we should see reason enough to raise the awareness of the nativespeaker.The desirability of so doing has never been more apparent than in these postimperialdays of international English. Ownership of English can no longer be said torest exclusively with those echelons of native-speaker society to which the EFL teacherhas typically belonged (Crystal, 1997:21, 130–135; Kachru, 1986; Pennycook,1994:267-270). The very term ‘native-speaker’ is of questionable status in some contexts(Rampton, 1990). The ability to make balanced, sociolinguistically informed judgementson form and appropriateness, whether in Singapore, Stuttgart or Slough, must surely be akey component of professionalism.It is widely assumed that most students will be able and willing to internaliseinstruction in language variation in such a way that it will be of practical value later. Butthis is a big assumption. One of our student respondents notes, ‘I thought the ideas of the... course were significantly important to my interests as an EFL teacher, but there wasnot much of a pedagogical focus there ...’, and another, even more bluntly, confesses,‘Honestly I still cannot tell how I could apply these ideas to my classroom practice.’Could our course writers have taken greater pains to make pedagogical applications and