Sociolinguistics meets education fostering dialect awareness among EFL learners for better production of standard codes
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Date
2016
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university of Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
The inescapability of sociolinguistic variation as a systematic occurrence has long been acknowledged by contemporary linguists. Nonetheless, the undemanding notion of incorporating sociolinguistic diversity teaching programmes involving standard and non-standard employment of spoken language into english as a foreign Language (EFL) classes was only approached by handful researchers. In essence, the present investigation aims at highlighting the prominence of integrating a range of dialect awareness activities into the EFL curricula of algerian universities. In pursuance of this aim, first year LMD students at Larbi Ben M'Hidi university were selected as the target population of the study. Two of eight pre-arranged groups were settled on to form the experimental and control groups. The former underwent a sequence of observation sessions that took place prior to the pre-test and subsequent to the post-test. It was only after the pre-observation got to an end that the quasi-experiment was executed and was essentially one in which both groups were pre- and post-tested with dissimilar treatments in the midst of the two tests; namely, students in the experimental group undertook a series of dialect awareness activities and instructions about their application in contexts while the control group ones were merely exposed to authentic spoken language. The results obtained from the quantitative examination of the gathered data reveal that the integration of dialect awareness activities had a significant impact on raising the students' recognition about dialect variation which, in turn, substantially affected their academic oral production. On account of these findings, a number of pedagogical implications are given to teachers, students and course designers, with reference to the restraints that obstructed this work from being more elaborate.
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Keywords
Sociolinguistique : enseignement : langue (anglais), Teaching : EFL : dialect awareness