The Social Context Of Language

Even the simplest of spoken statements may provide far more information about the speaker - his social standing, his immediate situation, his relationship with his audience - than he might ever suspect.sociolinguistics focuses on all the varied aspects of the social organization of speech. We share a linguistic repertoire with members of our social networks (and failure to "fit in" linguistically may have far-reaching consequences); we also alter our speech patterns according to the specific social situation.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This text includes a selection of commissioned and classic articles that introduce a range of theories of second language acquisition and the contested explanations of effective language learning.

This volume reconsiders the problem of context in language testing and other modes of assessment from the perspective of transdisciplinarity. Transdisciplinary assessment research brings together collaborators who draw on the strengths of their differing backgrounds and expertise in order to address high-stakes complex socially-relevant problems. Traditional treatments of context in language assessment research have generally been informed by individualist cognitive theories within measurement and psychometrics. The additive potential of alternative social theories, including theories of genre, situated learning, distributed cognition, and intercultural communication, has largely been overlooked. In this book, the benefits of socio-theoretical reconsiderations of context are discussed and further exemplified in transdisciplinary research studies that investigate the use of assessment in classroom and workplace settings. The book offers a renewed view of context in arguments for the validity of assessment practices, and will be of interest to assessment researchers, practitioners, and students in applied linguistics, education, educational psychology, language testing, and other related disciplines and fields.

The focus in this book is on learners experiences using Welsh outside class but the issues discussed have implications for a wide range of other situations where the population is bilingual or multilingual and interaction takes place in a language of wider communication.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.