Table Of ContentSOCIAL CLASS IN APPLIED
LINGUISTICS
‘Social class has finally emerged from the shadows in the field of applied linguistics.
ThereisnoscholarbetterqualifiedthanDavidBlocktoundertakearigorousexamination
ofthisimportantandcomplextopic.SocialClassinAppliedLinguisticsisgroundbreaking.’
Bonny Norton, University of British Columbia, Canada
‘This is a fascinating, sometimes provocative, and often innovative book, which brings
together concepts and ideas that have been begging to be discussed in their inter-
connection for a very long while... Social Class in Applied Linguistics is a timely book as
indeed many applied linguists are increasingly bringing aspects of social class to their
analyses. This book will provide a scholarly and stimulating set of building blocks from
which to develop the discussions.’
Clare Mar-Molinero, University of Southampton, UK
InthisgroundbreakingbookDavidBlockproposesanew workingdefinitionofsocial
class in applied linguistics.
Traditionally, research on language and identity has focused on aspects such as race,
ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion andsexuality. Political economy, andsocialclass,
as an identity inscription,havebeenundervalued.Thisbookarguesthatincreasingsocio-
economic inequality, which has come with the consolidation of neoliberal policies and
practicesworldwide,requireschangesinhowwethinkaboutidentityandproposesthat
social class should be brought to the fore as a key construct.
Social Class in Applied Linguistics begins with an in-depth theoretical discussion
of social class before considering the extent to which social class has been a key con-
structinthreegeneralareasofappliedlinguistics:sociolinguistics,bi/multilingualismand
second language acquisition and learning research. Throughout the book, Block suggests
waysinwhichsocialclassmightbeincorporatedintofutureappliedlinguisticsresearch.
Acriticalreadforpostgraduatestudentsandresearchersintheareasofappliedlinguistics,
languageeducationandTESOL.
David Block is Research Professor in Sociolinguistics for the Institució Catalana de
Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) and works in the Department d’Anglès i Lingüís-
tica at the Universitat de Lleida, Spain. He is co-author of Neoliberalism and Applied
Linguistics (Routledge, 2012).
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SOCIAL CLASS IN
APPLIED LINGUISTICS
David Block
Firstpublished2014
byRoutledge
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©2014DavidBlock
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infringe.
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AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary
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Block,David,1956–
Socialclassinappliedlinguistics/DavidBlock.
pagecm.
1.Appliedlinguistics–Socialaspects.2.Languageand
languages–Studyandteaching–Socialaspects.3.Language
andlanguages–Studyandteaching–Economicaspects.
4.Languageandculture–Socialaspects.5.Social
interaction.6.Sociolinguistics.I.Title.
P53.8.B592013
306.44–dc23
2013019146
ISBN:978-0-415-54817-5(hbk)
ISBN:978-0-415-54818-2(pbk)
ISBN:978-1-315-87114-1(ebk)
TypesetinBembo
byTaylorandFrancisBooks
CONTENTS
List of tables vi
Prologue vii
1 Setting the scene 1
2 What is social class? 24
3 Social class in sociolinguistics 73
4 Social class in bi/multilingualism research 110
5 Social class in second language acquisition and learning 146
Epilogue 164
Appendix 1: Goldthorpe’s class categories 172
Appendix 2: NS-SEC analytic classes, operational categories and
subcategories 2010 173
Appendix 3: Transcription conventions 175
References 176
Index 191
LIST OF TABLES
1.1 Two general (and oversimplified) approaches to epistemology
in the social sciences 17
1.2 Past (1990–2003) and predicted (2003–2030) GDP growth
figures across national states, regions and continents 22
3.1 Distribution of the [US] population and their educational,
occupational and income characteristics according to Kahl’s
social class divisions 77
3.2 Elaborated and restricted code 82
3.3 Three areas in the Belfast study 90
3.4 Some features of London English 98
A.1 Goldthorpe’s class categories 172
A.2 NS-SEC analytic classes, operational categories and
subcategories, 2010 173
PROLOGUE
A prologue can serve many purposes, from being a brief introduction to the topics
andargumentstobecoveredinabook,tobeingtheplacewherethankscanbegiven
to those who have helped the author during the book-writing process. These
things and more appear in this prologue as I take it as an opportunity to do some
general housekeeping. Thus I start with terminological issues, which are important
to dispatch at this early stage so as to avoid reader confusion later in the book,
before moving to consider a few scholarship issues. I end with acknowledgements.
Terminological issues
Asregards terminology, there isfirst and foremost socialclasstoconsider, thekey
term in the title and the main focus of this book. However, I mention it here not
to define it (an effort in this direction can be found in Chapter 2), but to justify its
use. In an earlier publication on the topic of social class and how it might be a
useful construct in second language acquisition and learning research, I used not
‘social class’, but ‘class’, writing the following as a reason for my choice:
Authorsinterestedinsocialstratification insocietiesuse twoterms: ‘class’ and
‘socialclass’.Inthisarticle,Iusetheformerterm,followingthegeneraltrend
in sociology.
(Block, 2012a: 203)
Some two years later, as I write this book, I find myself in somewhat of a dilemma
and considerably less sure about this choice: while using ‘class’ (and not ‘social class’)
might be a general trend in sociology today, it is certainly not the case that all
sociologistseschew‘socialclass’.Indeed,thereisatendencytousethetwotermsinter-
changeably. In applied linguistics, there has been a tradition of using ‘social class’
viii Prologue
whichgoesbacktoWilliamLabov’searlyvariationistworkinsociolinguistics,even
ifthis term appearsrelatively little inhis work as themajorityof the occurrences of
‘class’ are preceded by the adjectives ‘middle’, ‘working’ and ‘lower’. Some four
decadeslater,weseehowinBenRampton’s(2006)LanguageinLateModernitymatters
haveevolvedtotheextentthat‘class’and‘socialclass’seemtobeusedinterchangeably.
All of this leaves the matter pretty much up in the air. But there is more.
When discussing the book title with Louisa Semlyen and Sophie Jaques at
Routledge,aswellasseveralcolleaguesandassociates,Ihavebecomeevenlesssure
about what to do. ‘Class’ alone, as in a title such as Class in Applied Linguistics,
presents a certain ambiguity. There is ‘class’ as in ‘classroom’ or group of students,
which is very common in that part of applied linguistics that is devoted to second
language acquisition and learning. And, as Sophie pointed out to me at a time
whenIwasarguingfor‘class’over‘social class’,theformeralsohas connotationsof
distinction and taste, if not in the world of Bourdieu (1984), then in the more
prosaic world of expressions such as ‘a touch of class’ and ‘he/she has no class’.
In such circumstances, ‘social class’ seems to be a clearer term, which conveys
immediately what the main focus of the book is.
And so, it is ‘social class’ that appears in the title of the book and that I use
throughout the book. However, it should be noted that when I have needed an
adjectival form, as in ‘class position’ or ‘class thinking’, I have used ‘class’ without
the ‘social’ forstylistic reasons. Equally withstylein mind,I have at times plumped
for ‘class’ over ‘social class’ in places where I have used the latter term several times
in rapid succession. In a sense, there is a kind of feel factor at work which makes
me use ‘class’ instead of ‘social class’ on some occasions.
The other big term in the title of this book is applied linguistics. I will not
rehearse herea discussion of this term, which appears inBlock,Grayand Holborow
(2012), to say nothing of the numerous articles, chapters, monographs and collec-
tions that have discussed in detail the exact meaning of the term and defined what
it is that applied linguistics does (e.g. Simpson, 2011a). Chris Brumfit’s (1991: 46)
succinct definition of the field as ‘the study of real world problems in which
language is a central issue’ has always seemed appropriate; it certainly is to the
point. The same can be said of James Simpson’s more recent definition, which
appears in his introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics:
Applied linguistics is the academic field which connects knowledge about
language to decision-making in the real world. Generally speaking, the role
of applied linguistics is to make insights drawn from areas of language study
relevant to such decision-making. In this sense applied linguistics mediates
between theory and practice.
(Simpson, 2011: 1)
ThedefinitionsubsumesBrumfit’sandaddstoitareferencetothe‘applied’partof
theterm,asSimpsonseesaneedfor‘relevan[ce]to…decision-making’.However,
missing here is an explicit statement about how applied linguistics has always
Prologue ix
situateditselfatthecrossroadsofamultitudeofdisciplinesinthesocialsciencesand
the humanities. William Grabe sums up this characteristic of the field nicely in the
following quote from his introduction to a predecessor to Simpson’s collection,
The Oxford Handbook of Applied Linguistics (Kaplan, 2002), as follows:
By the close of the 1980s, a common trend was to view applied linguistics as
incorporating many subfields (as indicated earlier) and as drawing on many
supporting disciplines in addition to linguistics (e.g. psychology, education,
anthropology, sociology, political science, policy studies and public adminis-
tration, and English studies, including composition, rhetoric, and literary
studies). Combined with these two foundations (subfields and supporting
disciplines)wastheviewofappliedlinguisticsasproblemdrivenandreal-world
based rather than theory driven and discounted from real language use.
(Grabe, 2002: 4–5)
In this book, I follow scholars like Brumfit, Simpson and Grabe and understand
applied linguistics as a broad field that draws on multiple source disciplines in the
social sciences and the humanities. From this perspective, I feel justified in making
the implicit claim that ‘sociolinguistics’, ‘bi/multilingualism research’ and ‘second
language acquisition and learning’, all of which are used as referents to bodies of
research in this book, constitute subfields of a bigger entity called applied linguis-
tics. Some may contest the kind of divisions I make here and indeed I often found
it hard to write about the work of some authors under one heading and not
another one. Suffice it to say that I am aware of the many problems in the choices
I have made and that I have used such general terms as working categories which
have allowed me a fair amount of wiggle room as I develop my discussion of how
social class has and has not figured as a key construct in applied linguistics. For
example in Chapter 4, entitled ‘Social class in bi/multilingualism research’, I frame
English language learners around the world as bi/multilinguals and therefore
include discussions of material which some might see as part of ‘world Englishes’.
Another term I would like to clarify here is erasure, defined by Judith Irvine
and Susan Gal as follows:
Erasureistheprocessinwhichideology,insimplifyingthesociolinguistfield,
renders some persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible.
Factsthatareinconsistentwiththeideologicalschemeeithergounnoticedor
get explained away. So, for example, a social group or a language may be
imagined as homogenous, its internal variation disregarded.
(Irvine and Gal, 2000: 38)
Although not in the title of the book, erasure is a concept that underlies my chief
motivation for writing it, that is, the substantial and sometimes complete erasure of
social class in applied linguistics research due to the ways in which applied
linguists frame their discussions of issues such as identity, inequality, disadvantage
