Month: September 2020

Welcome to the third (2020) edition of the Educational Sociolinguistics class blog!

I’m very happy to be the instructor for this course – giving me the opportunity to launch this third edition of the class blog. Thanks and a nod to Alison Crump, who envisioned and created this blog back in 2016, and Mela Sarkar who carried on the tradition in 2019. And thanks for your baton-passing post, Mela! Both Alison and Mela are contributing members of our BILD research community (Mela’s brainchild) which has its own blog and an online, peer edited journal (Alison is co-editor). I encourage you to visit the links to these sites for more interactive discussions about all things sociolinguistic. And if you haven’t already (it was assigned reading for our first class!), be sure to read Alison’s research article about blogging as pedagogy (a.k.a. this blog site).  

As we are currently living through the Covid-19 pandemic, my sociolinguistic noticing often involves issues related to the current crisis. I want to share a youtube video with you that was sent around in our department at the end of March. At that time, our (Canadian) medical experts were not advising ‘masks for all’ – although masks were suggested or required in specific situations/locations such as on airplanes and in hospitals.

Since then, wearing masks in public has been mandated in Quebec and across the country.  

This video impressed me for a number of reasons, apart from the very clear and compelling message, and I can spin some of these as sociolinguistic: 

1. The register of this message. (Why did I find the delivery of this message so compelling and appropriate?)

2. The clarity of this message in English, by an ESL speaker. (Why do I think the speaker in the video learned English as a second/foreign/additional language?)

3. What type of speech act or event would you categorize this as?

We have only had one class together so far, but I already have an inkling of the rich language-related experiences that the class brings, and intellectual and creative thinking that this class is capable of. I look forward to being inspired by your blog postings over this term.

Sociolinguistic noticing in the COVID-19 era

The previous edition of this blog ran from January through May 2019, spanning a few months in the academic life of one MA cohort in McGill’s Second Language Education program—I was very proud to be their instructor, and encourage readers to look back at what they wrote, as well as to the first, 2016 edition of this blog. Hats off to Alison Crump for bringing it into being back then!

As of early spring 2020, a year after the enjoyable flurry of the Winter 2019 blog posts, our MA cohort, our university, our city—indeed, most of the world—was in lockdown, to an extent that none of us had imagined would be possible, because of the global pandemic that continues as these words are written. A few months later, lockdown has now been lifted and classes are continuing. However, this time (very unusually for McGill) the course is completely online, as I pass the blogging baton to my colleague and old friend Caroline Riches, instructor for Educational Sociolinguistics this term. For her sake and the students’ sake, I am very glad that blogging as a writing genre—not to mention as pedagogy—is an activity that is already completely online and that thrives in that medium. I encourage our readers to follow Caroline and her students this term, and to respond copiously and often!

css.php