by Ariel Vázquez Carranza
“The world is not a nice place for everyone, and sociolinguistics has the capacity to show, in great detail and with an unparalleled amount of precision, how language reflects the predicaments of people in a globalizing world. It has the capacity to read the infinitely big features of the world from infinitely small details of human communicative behaviour…”
Blommaert (2010: 198)
1. Introduction
Second and foreign language teaching is one of the most popular and recognised ways of promoting and supporting interculturality since teaching a language is teaching a particular social and cultural expression. It is a vocation that requires professional training and development in different areas. It is therefore common, for example, to find undergraduate and postgraduate programmes that focus on language teaching education in universities all over the world. Teaching a language is an intricate task. Its complexity comes from the fact that a human language is primarily a social entity (Sapir 1929; Wittgentein ([1953] 1963; Tomasello 2008). In other words, teaching a language requires not only knowing its formal linguistic system but also, and perhaps most importantly, the social and communicative aspects that come with its use.
The present entry is about an editorial project that seeks to contribute to the professionalisation of the language teacher specifically in the sociolinguistic domain; in other words, its main objective is to educate language teachers about sociolinguistics. The project is entitled Sociolingüística para la enseñanza de lenguas (Sociolinguistics for language teaching) that came out in May 2022, published by the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. To my knowledge, the book is the first collection of introductory chapters to a diversity of sociolinguistic themes written in Spanish that is particularly addressed to service and pre-service language teachers. In what follows, I describe the reasoning behind the editorial project and how it came about, but first I would like to point out the relevance of sociolinguistics for language teaching.
2. Sociolinguistics and language teaching
In general, sociolinguistic knowledge helps us to recognise ourselves linguistically as social beings and to understand ourselves as humans. In particular, sociolinguistic awareness for language teachers is crucial because of the social and cultural nature of language. With sociolinguistic knowledge, language teachers can accurately explain and describe to students aspects related to the societies and cultures of the language in question. For example, sociolinguistic knowledge helps teachers to answer questions about language use such as, why are there differences in speech between one speaker and another? How is language related to culture? How are social structures reflected in language use, in conversation and communication? What are the cultural particularities of the production of social actions? etc. It is fundamental to have answers to these questions from academic sources because, while teaching, the language teacher shapes, for better or for worse, students’ linguistic ideologies and their sociolinguistic awareness.
3. Intercultural views of sociolinguistics for language teaching
A salient particularity of the academic world is that even though there may be a general agreement on a given issue, its assimilation and explanation may be different by different academic communities. One might say, for example, that a handbook represents what a particular community of scholars considers relevant to say about a particular field in a particular point in time. Sociolingüística para la enseñanza de lenguas is about that: it shows what a group of academics from different Mexican higher education institutions and one Chilean university consider relevant to discuss about sociolinguistics and language teaching. In particular, the book represents the views of these academics on what a language teacher needs to know about sociolinguistics to further develop their teaching practice. For sure, there are different texts about sociolinguistics for language teachers; they are all mostly written in English; perhaps the most well-known is the collection of chapters edited by McKay and Hornberger (1996). However, to my knowledge, there has not yet been a book about sociolinguistics addressed to a Spanish speaking language teacher audience.
4. From call for papers to publication
The call for papers was intended to appeal to scholars interested in a vast range of sociolinguistic themes. The main idea was that language and its use are inseparable because language, society and communication originated simultaneously (Schlieben-Lange 1977). That is, the project’s ontological conception of sociolinguistics is that sociolinguistics is about the social conditioning of language and the linguistic conditioning of society. The project received a total of thirteen proposals. The review process was carried out by scholars from Mexico and Spain. Each contribution was reviewed by two specialists, one specialist on the sociolinguistic theme in question and the other on language teaching. At the end of the process, eleven papers were accepted; the topics cover variationism, code switching, language shift, identity, linguistic relativity, politeness, terms of address, symbolic interactionism, classroom discourse, conversation analysis, and interactional repair. The publication of the book was funded by the Federal Mexican Government and had a print run of 250 copies.
5. CA in the book!
The last two chapters of the book are, to my knowledge, the first Spanish written works on conversation analysis and language teaching. One is about the use of conversation analysis in the study of language teaching; it particularly focuses on the interactional characteristics of language teaching, learning as an interactional achievement, and applied conversation analysis in language teaching. The other chapter is about the study of repair in the language classroom from a conversation-analytic multimodal perspective The chapter highlights the relevance of multimodality in the study of classroom interactions and provides examples of the most salient descriptions of repair in the language classroom.
The book is available online at http://www.publicaciones.cucsh.udg.mx/kiosko/2022/Socioling%C3%BC%C3%ADstica%20PDF%202022.pdf
References
Blommaert, Jan (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
McKay, Sandra L. and Hornberger, Nancy H. (1996). Sociolinguistics and language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tomasello, Michael (2008). Origins of Human Communication. London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sapir, Edward (1921). Language. New York: Harcourt.
Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte (1977). Iniciación a la Sociolingüística. Madrid: Gredos.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig ([1953] 1963). Philosophical investigations, Oxford, Basil Blackwell & Mott, Ltd.