The Impact on Teachers of Language Variation as a Course Component
SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION
Language teacher education programs typically include the topic of language variation, at least as an option and sometimes as a compulsory element. What this includes, and how much of any program it occupies, varies greatly. It may be found as a named unit within traditional sociolinguistics modules (as at the University of Birmingham), or as a ‘topic’ or ‘theme’ in more enticingly named packages involving some combination of words such as ‘discourse’, ‘culture’, ‘society’, ‘social’, ‘context’, or more widely disseminated throughout a program. In recent years, even introductory texts on language awareness aimed at pre-experience teachers have included the topic among their contents (see, for example, Arndt et al, 2000: 33-7 and 131 - 51). Instruction may address regional variation (accent, dialect etc.), standard and non-standard forms, sociolects, creoles, speech/writing differences, variation according to social situation (formality/informality etc.), gender and literary vs. non-literary English. This is by no means an exhaustive list.
We assume that program 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 at their disposal which can make them better teachers’, or McKay and Hornberger (1996:ix), who claim that teachers need ‘an understanding of the relationship between language and society’ in order to fulfil ‘the challenging task of respecting linguistic diversity while promoting common standards’. It is more likely, however, that they are intuitively 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 of growing confidence. When we first approach a foreign language, it stands before us as a monolith; we are not interested in, still less worried by, variation because all our energy is absorbed by saying anything at all. When we get much better, we need to master what Campbell and Wales (1970) and Hymes (1970) so famously conceptualized as appropriateness, and the consensus is that this aspect of language is to a great extent culturally determined.
What about the native-speaker student-teacher? Whereas the non-native is confronted by cultural strangeness, the native-speaker student-teacher, immersed in native culture, needs to have the language made strange again, to borrow from Brecht (1951). Most native-speakers of any language are, almost inevitably, inculcated in childhood with limited and limiting views about their native language. After many years of thinking about language sociolinguistically, the specialist may find it hard to recapture that first enthusiasm at the most trivial of discoveries in the domain of variation; but, if we can manage that, then we should see reason enough to raise the awareness of the native speaker. The desirability of so doing has never been more apparent than in these post imperial days of international English. Ownership of English can no longer be said to rest exclusively with those echelons of native-speaker society to which the EFL teacher has 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 judgements on form and appropriateness, whether in Singapore, Stuttgart or Slough, must surely be a key component of professionalism.
It is widely assumed that most students will be able and willing to internalize instruction in language variation in such a way that it will be of practical value later. But this 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 was not 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 implications more explicit? It is clear that how language variation is taught is as important as whether it is taught.
