Page 258 - Beyond Methods

246 Ensuring social relevance
norms of interaction in home language and home culture can sig- nificantly help teachers create the conditions necessary for their learners to master the “standard” variety taught at school. In her well-known study on this subject, Shirley Brice Heath (1983) demonstrated how the discontinuity in the patterns of language learning and language use in schools and communities of children from African-American families in the southeastern United States adversely affected their language development. When teachers were made aware of this discontinuity and changed their teaching strate- gies, students were found to be more active and more motivated to participate in classroom events. Summarizing research studies in this area, Geneva Smitherman (1998, p. 142) observes, “When stu- dents’ primary/home language is factored into language planning policy and the teaching-learning process, it is a win-win situation for all.”
Standardization in the L2 Context
The need to recognize the legitimacy of “nonstandard” varieties be- comes even more acute in the context of the different varieties of World Englishes that are learned and taught in various parts of the world. In most cases, these varieties came about because of colonial history and are retained because of postcolonial economy. As Thiru Kandaiah (1998, p.104) succinctly puts it, the users of these vari- eties “take hold of an originally alien code which, moreover, was imposed on them. But without disregarding entirely the nature of the rule-governed system they received from its original users, they still go on to reconstruct it to make it serve their semantic, actional and interactional purposes. In doing so, they operate in immediate interaction with the social, cultural, historical and other such par- ticularities of their contexts.”
At times, the particularities of these varieties conflict with the process of standardization. Consider, for example, the English lan- guage policy of two nations with two different varieties—India and Singapore. As former British colonies, they both share a common colonial heritage. They both are multilingual and multicultural so- cieties, though of very different magnitude in terms of economy, size, and population. In both countries, English functions as a lingua franca, a common language that links people of different languages