UNIT 6

1. SOCIOLINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE TEACHING /LEARNING

Language teaching & learning & sociolinguistics have certain common concerns:
 The role of English in the world (as first or second/foreign language)
 Contexts in which this language is acquired
 The way in which it interacts with other languages
 The norms that determine the use of English
Communicative competence shapes the ability to interact successfully in any
speech community. Someone who has acquired the language in a naturalistic context
acquires sociolinguistic rules together with linguistic knowledge & other competences. This
brings up the importance of language learning in a second/foreign context. As a second
language, the learner will have countless occasions to acquire/learn the sociolinguistic
rules through interaction/close contact with native speakers. The learning environment
also raises an issue:
 Should sociolinguistic rules be taught in class? Or this is sth the learner will deal with when
having the chance to interact within a speech community where the language is spoken as a
mother tongue?
 Motivation & purpose of learning the language. If it is learnt to be used within an English-
speaking community or as a lingua franca to communicate with other non-native speakers.
The inclusion of sociolinguistic behavior in teaching materials will help the
language learner to develop their ability to interact in a foreign speech community.
But sociolinguistic patterns are often unreliable as they are based on the individual
intuitions of material writers who may report on conventions in their own speech
communities, or this information is based on community norms rather than on actual use.
Two aspects need to be taken into account:
 Whose rules of speaking we want to include in the teaching materials
 To what extend we can generalize them to the point of using them in second language
instruction

2. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE IN LANGUAGE TECHING/LEARNING

Communicative competence is needed for successful interaction among members
of the same speech community. From the point of view of language learning, as the
process of learning a foreign/second language inevitably involves some degree of
intercultural communication, a situation of contact between different cultural values, &
social practices.
Linguistic competences: knowledge of lexical, phonological & syntactical elements &
other dimensions of language that the learner has learned as a part of the system. It
comprises the knowledge of vocabulary, pronunciation rules, syntactic patterns & the
cognitive organization & storage of this knowledge in the brain of the language learner. It
varies from one learner to another depending on various factors (numbers of years spent
learning the second language, rate of learning, age of first contact with the second
language, learner's motivation, learning context...).
Sociolinguistic competences: concerned with the social & cultural conditions for the
use of language & the social conventions that rule language use in a specific speech
community. It comprises norms regarding politeness, relations between the sexes, different
classes, social groups, registers… They are normally acquired after some degree of
linguistic competence has been attained. Lack of knowledge of sociolinguistic rules &
behaviors that govern interlocutor's speech may result into communication breakdown.
The higher the learner's linguistic competence the more they will be expected to have
adequate sociolinguistic & pragmatic competences in their interaction with a native
speaker.
Pragmatic competence: functional use of linguistic resources such as language
functions & speech acts in interaction. It concerns itself with the learner's mastery of
discourse, markers, cohesion & coherence, the recognition of text types, the presence of
irony, parody & politeness
 3. THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC BEHAVIOUR OF ENGLISH SPEAKERS: RULES OF
SPEAKING
Speech communities exhibit different styles of interaction at the sociolinguistic &
pragmatic level. The analysis of sociolinguistic behavior in native English speaking
communities can provide useful insights for the teaching & learning of languages. Two
samples of some rules of speaking that can be taught in the classroom:
Address behavior: the way people address one another in different situations. It is a
recurrent topic in sociolinguistic research as they are common in discourse & easily
observed. There is a whole range of options that the speaker can use to refer to the
addressee & may vary from one language to the other, depending on: the social
conventions, the type of relationship among the interlocutors & the sociocultural distance
between the languages involved.
Example: the form ma’am has different meanings in the South of the USA (to indicate
you had not heard what your female interlocutor has said, with the meaning of “you are
welcome” & it’s also used in different social contexts. In the North it tended to be used
among strangers & in the South also with acquaintances & friends.
Forms of address are a sign of status relationships & different languages may offer
different possibilites & degrees of formality & social distance.
Telephoning: The way people answer the phone or initiate a telephone conversation
varies from language to language & culture to culture. These rules are not generally open
to conscious consideration & often, speakers are just unaware of them. The rules of self-
identification in telephone calls is very variable among cultures, but they are also likely to
change due to the rapid development of information technologies & increasing number of
monile phones which let the answerer know who is calling.

4. SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE USE IN IMMERSION

CLASSROOMS
Bilingual education responds to social needs of developing proficiency in the
second language. The success is subjected to external factors:
 Sociopolitical situation
 Variation in the teaching resources
 Extend of immersion (partial or total, early or late)
 Status of L2 outside the classroom
One of the problems found through classroom observation is that a diglossic
situation can develop in immersion classrooms just as in any speech community: the
language of instruction acts as the formal language variety used with the teacher & used
for academic purposes, & the L1 is preferred in informal speech & social interaction with
other classmates & acts as subordinate language. The main difference between this kind of
diglossic speech community & any other outside this context is that these “special” speech
communities in classroom change over time due to cognitive, social or personal factors
affecting this peculiar speech community.
Additional difficulty for the language learner: The sociolinguistic rules may vary from
one place to another one, as the rules of behavior are specific to a particular speech
community & not necessarily part of a whole country. This changes when a language is
used as lingua franca, as this is not the native language for any of the speakers & its used
is not culturally bond.
Another aspect of language learning related to sociolinguistics is the Dialect used:
Some varieties have more prestige or social status than others, & this can determine
the variety that a given institution tries to teach or a language learner wants to learn. When
English is learned as a foreign language, some decisions are made regarding the language
variety to be learned, & are often made by the institution where the language is being
taught.

5. ANALYSIS OF THE EFL CLASSROOM LANGUAGE

Classroom language is organized & has a purpose. This can be seen in the way turn-
taking is organized. Turn-taking is frequently determined by the types of interlocutors &
dominated by the teacher. Classroom language has often nothing to do with real or general
English, so idiomatic language is not always part of the classroom, nor are complex
syntactic structures or specific vocabulary.
It is part of an asymmetric encounter. One of the participants controls the direction of
the dialogue & makes use of a particular language, known as teacher talk (variety of
language used by teachers in the process of teaching).
The analysis of teacher-led classroom discourse, language cannot be understood
without taking into account its social context. The three-part chain pattern of teacher
initiation, student response & teacher evaluation is the most frequent pattern of
classroom discourse:
 TEACHER: Initiate interaction (1); Provide a follow-up (feedback) (3)
 STUDENT: Response (2)
A language classroom is special because language is used to talk about language
(metalanguage) rather than other subjects where the language is just a vehicle to talk
about contents.

6. IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

The practice in spoken interaction does nothing to help students with the roles they will
need to play outside the classroom. This is one of the shortcomings of a task-based
instruction. These tasks are used to develop linguistic skills. Immersion programs entail
content-based instruction, similar to task-based instruction. Students are expected to
learn a second language through its use. But recent research has shown this limit the
possibilities of the learners to interact & develop receptive skills but their productive skills
are limited.
Solution: attempts should be made to enhance & widen the varieties of input the
learner has access to & to force students' output. One possible direction is greater use
of student-student interaction, including tasks & pair/group work.

7. PRAGMATICS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

Curricula & teaching materials have begun to include pragmatic components or to
adopt a pragmatic approach as their organizing principle. Proposals for instruction in
pragmatic competence are based on the analysis of native speaker discourse or on the
comparison of interlanguage data. But most recommendations for instruction in
pragmatics have not been examined in action in the classroom setting so it isn’t known
how effective they are.
Kasper & Rose: language learners can benefit from positive transfer of
communicative acts found across distant speech communities, as the speech act set
for apologies (it comprises an explicit apology, an explanation & the admission/denial of
responsibility. These strategies are found in different languages like English, Hebrew or
Thai).
Learners can also get pragmalinguistic knowledge without any explicit instruction
if there is an analogous form-function mapping between L1 & L2 (English could & would
have equivalents in other Germanic languages).

8. LANGUAGE IN THE LAW

The study of language in the legal context is a new field of study. The interface
between sociolinguistics & the law is known as forensic linguistics & centers on the
study of discourse in legal settings/texts. Language use in legal contexts is not different
from other communicative situation. Early studies showed that jurors were inclined to find
that witnesses making use of a powerful style were more convincing & trustworthy than
those employing a powerless style (the way information was presented & the witness
expressed him/herself did an effect on the final outcome).
There is a clear power imbalance between the lawyer & the witness. Lawyer controls
the discourse by long-winded questioning that requires minimal response, being coercive &
controlling. Linguistic strategies used by lawyers:
 Interruptions
  Reformulation of witness’s descriptions of events or people
 Manipulation of lawyer silence (strategic silence)
 Non-recognition of witnesses’ need to use silence as part of the answer
 Incorporation of damaging presuppositions in questions
 Metalinguistic directives given to the witness (You must answer this question)
 Management of topics in order to convey a particular impression to the jury.
The amount of work in forensic linguistics in increasing & the effect it has on people's
lives is paramount. The study of speech behavior is a clear example of how sociolinguistics
can have clear application for our lives. Studies in applied sociolinguistics regarding
legal language have undertaken three main areas:
 Communicative difficulties
 Comprehension of legal texts: specific jargon & the intricacy of the syntax used
 Consequence of globalization, colonization & the migration movements:
emerging demand for studies relating communication problems faced by non-native
speakers in the legal process. This situation requires the presence of well-trained
interpreters.

9. STANDARD ENGLISH & WORLD ENGLISHES

Standard English refers to the variety of English used by the social elite who are
part of a socially, economically & politically dominant group in English-speaking countries.
It’s the one preferred by the media & taught at school & is considered to be
“prestigious”. Non-standard English are those varieties that don’t conform to the
standard spoken by formally educated native speakers. The existence of a standard is
characteristic of any language & related to groups of people that are literate & school-
oriented. The standard is also associated with geographic variation (regions where
institutional/economical power is located). Defining a standard is not easy or possible, so it
can be said that the RP (Received Pronunciation), generally considered the standard
England is the same as English standard in Ireland, Australia or the USA.
The dispersal of English over the world can be divided into two phases
 First Diaspora: migration of around 25,000 people from England, Scotland & Ireland
to North America, Australia & New Zealand. They share some features & have developed
through history incorporating vocabulary from indigenous languages.
 Second Diaspora: 18th & 19th centuries. Africa. English in West Africa is linked to
the slave trade & the development of pidgin & Creole languages. Some of the pidgins &
creoles developed from English contact are now widely used, mostly as a second language.
In East Africa the situation was different, English was used in government, education & in
the law & when the countries gained independence, English was kept as an official
language in some of them & as a second language in others.
Kachru → developed a model of the spread of English that has been most influential in
sociolinguistics. 3 concentric circles:

INNER CIRCLE OUTER CIRCLE EXPANDING CIRCLE

 Norm dependent (English learnt as a
 Norm developing (used in
foreign language)
 Norm providing countries where English is in
 Not used for official purposes
(native language) the process of being accepted)
 Perceived as a useful language
 Clear patterns of  New Englishes
 Use the standardized variety (mix BrE &
variation  Spoken as a part of a
AmE)
(geographical & multilingual repertoire
 risk of allowing interference between
social  Simplified system of
English & the mother tongue (false friends),
differences) phonology
miscommunication
 Syntax: features shared
 increasing presence of borrowings from
English
They stand for the types of spread, the patters of acquisition & the position of the
English language in different cultural contexts.