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The Impact on Teachers of Language Variation as a Course Component METHODS

المؤلف:  Corony Edwards & Charles Owen

المصدر:  Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education

الجزء والصفحة:  P45-C3

2026-08-12

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The Impact on Teachers of Language Variation as a Course Component

METHODS

To evaluate the impact of a certain kind of teaching, we took the obvious route of asking the recipients of that teaching for their views. We approached 125 former and current students and analyzed the responses of the 86 who replied. As we shall see, the overall student response to our teaching was, on balance, favorable. How far this reflects ‘reality’ is less clear. While students are very well qualified to give an opinion, they are not necessarily the only people whose opinions matter. As a cross-validating exercise, we also collected a number of opinions from academics on the value of teaching about language variation. Not surprisingly, they are all very much in favor. We have not approached employers, still less the English learners who are taught by our students. Would they consider it important for teachers to be informed about language variation? Do their views count? Such questions might be investigated in future work.

We chose as our subject group teachers who had participated in our open distance learning program, since all cohorts had completed an essentially identical course in sociolinguistics. The course was delivered as a booklet and sets of supplementary readings to be worked through independently, free from any ‘teacher effect’ and the year-to-year variations inevitable in live classes taught on campus. This meant that our subject group comprised English teachers of various nationalities working in a number of countries around the world, and that a questionnaire that could function as a straightforward self-report instrument was the most practical option as a primary research instrument. Although self-report is notoriously unreliable for some purposes, it is perfectly appropriate for a study that asks for introspection into issues such as relevance of a topic to one’s professional practice.