The Ethnography of speaking and language teaching

Abstract

The relevance of linguistic research to language teaching lies in its capacity and potential to clarify what language is. The ethnography of speaking, a development in sociolinguistics, has the potential to make a great contribution to language teaching because .it presents a more complete and richer view of language. This deeper understanding of what language is stems from the ethnography of speaking's focus on what language is f or, on what language is like when it is not taken as a self-contained system but instead is situated in its social context. This paper attempts to summarize certain aspects of the ethnographic viewpoint and certain findings from applying the viewpoint to the classroom. The findings from ethnographic research in the classroom and the community have uncovered the importance of finding out what constitutes preferred behaviour for the teacher in verbal interaction contexts and of determining the goodness of fit between styles of teaching and styles of learning and between language use in school and language use at home. Based on the review of the literature, the paper suggests directions for further research and presents implications for language teaching, with particular reference to the Philippine setting. The implications for language teaching are given in terms of implications for curriculum planning, syllabus design, materials development, test construction, and classroom teaching.