ABSTRACT

When sociolinguistics emerged on the American scene in the 1960s, the service of society was an important part of its context. To be sure, issues of theory and method in relation to formal linguistics loomed large, but these issues were engaged in partly because it was believed that the kind of formal linguistics advocated by Chomsky could not serve society. The need was particularly felt by some concerned with language in education. The Chomskian image of a fluent, creative, ideal speaker, of a child as the site of the ineluctable unfolding of an innate ability, stood in poignant contrast to the realities and diversities of the actual life of language in urban neighbourhoods and schools. The Chomskian withdrawal from observation and inference of use in daily life stood in conflict with two linked concerns that are particularly strong for those concerned with children in urban education settings: to start where the child (actually) is, and to recognize abilities that may be unseen at school, or misconstrued when seen (cf. the essay translated in Hymes, 1984).