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There ain’t no doubt about it: Teaching EAL learners to recognize variation and switch/shift between varieties and registers is crucial to communicative competence
Author(s) -
Schaefer Vance,
Warhol Tamara
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
tesol journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.468
H-Index - 14
eISSN - 1949-3533
pISSN - 1056-7941
DOI - 10.1002/tesj.504
Subject(s) - variation (astronomy) , psychology , communicative competence , grammar , curriculum , linguistics , competence (human resources) , vocabulary , foreign language , pedagogy , mathematics education , social psychology , philosophy , physics , astrophysics
The field of English as an additional language (EAL) advocates using authentic materials and meeting the needs of students. Yet often language in the EAL classroom appears to not reflect the linguistic variation (e.g., ethnic, regional, gender, sexual orientation, generational) of English typically encountered outside of the classroom. Therefore, teaching about different varieties of English offers many advantages. Through making comparisons, learners boost their awareness of differences in grammar, vocabulary, and pragmatics among dialects and registers. Additionally, learners gain an understanding of beliefs associated with these varieties. Furthermore, knowledge of linguistic variation provides students with additional communicative resources, which they can then deploy as they codeswitch, codemix, and styleshift between dialects, registers, and styles, and thereby more faithfully express themselves and confidently interact with others. In short, learners enhance their communicative competence. This article offers an overview of a communicative repertoire approach (Rymes, Flores, & Pomerantz, 2016) with a template of activities to aid instructors in integrating language variation into an EAL curriculum, referencing the five Cs (communication, cultures, connections, comparisons, and communities) of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (n.d.), explicit instruction, and enhanced awareness.