Sociolinguistics as a pathway to global citizenship: critically observing ‘self’ and ‘other’

Abstract

In this article, we discuss how sociolinguistics can serve as an entryway into conversations about diversity, equity, and social justice, as part of education for global citizenship. Our approach, informed by Critical Language Awareness (CLA) theory, engages students with both unfamiliar and familiar linguistic forms, in order to promote critical reflection on ‘self’ and ‘other’, a crucial component of global citizenship development in higher education. We draw on our experience teaching cross- and intra-linguistic variation in linguistics courses, using a curricular sequence that involves three central concepts: Descriptivism, Indexicality, and Language Ideology. Through this sequence, students become more aware of their implicit biases and learn to argue against pervasive linguistic stereotypes and misconceptions. We reference examples of student work and comments from course evaluations showing how students internalise and apply course learning. This study adds to the growing body of research on how CLA is taught and learned within the higher education curriculum.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2021.1925289 .

Keywords:

• Critical language awareness
• empathy
• indexicality
• language diversity
• language ideology
• linguistics edagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Linguistic Society of America reports that as of 2017, the number of linguistics undergraduate students pursuing and completing degrees more than doubled in the United States in the previous two decades (Linguistics Society of America, 2020, p. 19).

2 We use bold throughout in order to show how we integrate the key concepts into our practice.

3 The language and culture course and the variation course discussed here were offered in 2015 and 2019, respectively. The First-Year Seminar is a required course for first-years, and seminars are taught on a variety of topics, by faculty from various departments and programs.

4 Each of these courses has been taught multiple times over the past ten years.

5 This film is out-of-date in many ways, but provides a useful starting point for conversation, including questions like: What is different today? Who is excluded from this film and would need to be included in a remake?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sayaka Abe

Sayaka Abe is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA). She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from University at Buffalo. Abe’s research examines emotive meanings in Japanese from cognitive semantic and historical linguistic perspectives. She also applies insights from her theoretical and empirical work to educational linguistics. Her recent publications include chapters in Cognitive-Functional Approaches to the Study of Japanese as a Second Language (2016, De Gruyter Mouton) and in Manga!: Visual Pop-Culture in ARTS Education (2020, InSEA Publications). Abe is currently a board member of Canadian Association for Japanese Language Education (CAJLE) and the chief editor of Journal CAJLE. She is currently working on her book manuscript, entitled Semantic Change, Causation and Emotivity (under contract).

Shawna Shapiro

Shawna Shapiro is an Associate Professor of Writing and Linguistics at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA), where she also directs the Writing & Rhetoric Program. She received her Master’s in TESOL and her PhD in English Language & Rhetoric from the University of Washington in Seattle. Shapiro’s research looks at the experiences of multilingual students (including both immigrant and international populations) in U.S. colleges and universities, focusing on issues such as academic integration, curricular innovation, and institutional policy. Her most recent empirical work has focused on refugee-background students transitioning to higher education in Vermont. Shapiro’s work has appeared in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including Research in the Teaching of English, TESOL Quarterly, and the Journal of Language, Identity & Education. She is currently working on her third book, entitled Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom, which is under contract with Routledge.