Benefit of teacher who know sociolinguistics in teaching
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engleangsam
- Posts: 2
- Joined: Tue Jan 18, 2011 6:17 am
Benefit of teacher who know sociolinguistics in teaching
I want to ask question that Does teacher who are aware of the sociolinguistics context have insight at their disposal which can make them better teacher? Why and why not?
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fluffyhamster
- Posts: 3031
- Joined: Tue Oct 26, 2004 6:57 pm
- Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again
Well, if you take too much of the socio- out of the linguistics, then what you can end up with is something rather arid, if not quite strange or apparently even quite pointless (depending on your viewpoint, of course).
That is, if one takes little or no account of the pragmatic and contextual factors involved in language use, then the resulting "description" and its applications will more than likely be of relatively limited utility, and therefore of quite limited appeal.
Which of course explains why language teachers are generally content to make do with quite traditional and "boring" notions (but bolstered by the likes of Hymes - 'communicative competence' and all that jazz - with mostly only occasional forays into the likes of Halliday), rather than depending on "e.g." the Chomskyan stuff much (regardless of how much lip-service is paid to Chomsky's "revolutionary" whizz-bang wonderstuff).
Anyway, Wikipedia is never too bad a place to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics
All that being said, a lot of sociolinguistic stuff may itself be of quite marginal interest and/or not need to be pointed out in too much detail to most users, who will grasp "the system" well enough to be left to get on with using it "regardless"!
That is, if one takes little or no account of the pragmatic and contextual factors involved in language use, then the resulting "description" and its applications will more than likely be of relatively limited utility, and therefore of quite limited appeal.
Which of course explains why language teachers are generally content to make do with quite traditional and "boring" notions (but bolstered by the likes of Hymes - 'communicative competence' and all that jazz - with mostly only occasional forays into the likes of Halliday), rather than depending on "e.g." the Chomskyan stuff much (regardless of how much lip-service is paid to Chomsky's "revolutionary" whizz-bang wonderstuff).
Anyway, Wikipedia is never too bad a place to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics
All that being said, a lot of sociolinguistic stuff may itself be of quite marginal interest and/or not need to be pointed out in too much detail to most users, who will grasp "the system" well enough to be left to get on with using it "regardless"!