ABSTRACT
One of the overarching goals of this volume is to acquaint the language instructor or curriculum developer with the basic facts about sociolinguistics and the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation in second languages. This knowledge, in turn, should positively impact the learning environment and the outcomes of learners who seek to develop communicative competence in a second language. In addition to the big-picture implications of knowing about sociolinguistic variation, such as an informed process of target norm evaluation and selection (see Chapter Nine), an understanding of language variation should impact daily lesson plans and material selection. We begin this chapter with a few scenarios that demonstrate that sociolinguistic variation is present in every lesson simply because the language used will represent some, but not all, speakers of a language. Thus, even when these decisions are not conscious, we decide which speakers are represented in our classrooms through our selection of materials that provide input to learners, through our explanations of grammatical phenomena, and through our articulation of learning objectives for each lesson we teach. The following examples of classroom events and interactions demonstrate scenarios in which a teacher’s knowledge of sociolinguistic variation can serve as a tremendous support. We begin with the example shown in Scenario 1.
