Sociolinguistics Eight

“[T]eachers and students adopt their own overt policies for coming to terms with an official policy which is in fact impossible to implement as intended.”

Ho ho, yes.

I am wary of the, let’s say, applicable value of this unit. I don’t think that there’s any practicing teacher anywhere in the world who needs help looking at the structural problems of their respective educational systems in order to rationalize the limitations it imposes on their classrooms. It’s reassuring to have it cloaked in academic jargon as this makes it seem more official and a real thing, as opposed to the usual moaning and griping, but a diagnosis isn’t much use if it then doesn’t lead to a cure. I’ll link to a previous rant of mine on this, where you can note the relatively short time scale it takes even those with little invested in a system to recognize its inherent flaws. At the end of the day it’s still incumbent on teachers to make it work, however much they may feel it amounts to little more than damage limitation. You can only make excuses for so long before you become part of the problem.

You could justifiably argue that this isn’t the point of this module and the associated research. Fair enough, but that does rather seem to ignore the ‘applied’ part of ‘applied linguistics. I suspect this tendency for hand-washing non-partisan description is something I’m going to have to make my peace with over the length of this course.

Still, Ricento and Hornberger at least get round to ‘unintended outcomes’ (p404), so we’re heading in the right direction.

When I was in school, I quickly realized that being friendly to the dinner ladies meant it was easier to cut in line at the front of the queue, even though they shouldn’t really have let me. This was a big deal, believe me. On which note –

“In the ELT literature, the practitioner is often an afterthought who implements what “experts” in the government, board of education, or central school administration have already decided.” (p417)

‘Twas ever thus…