Publisher's Synopsis
The purpose of this book is to provide graduates and advanced undergraduates in education and related fields, such as communication and applied linguistics, with an introduction to what they need to know about sociolinguistics: its roots in anthropological linguistics and dialectology, its developments over the past 30 years and the ways in which today's sociolinguistics reflects the recent paradigmatic shifts that provide new perspectives on context and linguistic ideology.
Our experience in teaching a broad range of non (linguistic) specialist students has convinced us of the need for a new approach that contextualizes research practices and sociolinguistic findings in terms directly relevant to education. There are a number of texts that provide a general review of sociolinguistic literature (e.g., Coupland and Jaworski "Readings in Sociolinguistics"1997) ; or deal with specific educational matters (M. Stubbs, "Educational Linguistics" 1989); or specific approaches relevant to education, M. Saville-Troike "Ethnography of Communication" or S. Romaine's work. We also have excellent collections of recent papers such as Kroskrity's volume "Regimes of Language" with key work on linguistic ideology, and "Voices of Authority: education and linguistic difference" edited by Monica Heller and Marilyn Martin -Jones, (Greenwood Press forthcoming). There is, however, no single volume that brings the field together while providing a perspective from past work that presents a coherent set of theoretical premises and findings against which to evaluate recent work and paradigm changes, and at the same accounts for the influence sociolinguistics has had, and needs to have on the field of education.
