Participatory pedagogy, sociolinguistics and the total linguistic fact

This paper takes a sociolinguistic look at participatory pedagogy and argues that participatory pedagogy offers a fuller and more creative exploration of language than many other types of language teaching. The central sociolinguistic idea is that linguistic form, interactional activity and ideology are all very closely tied together in communication, and that if you want to a properly rounded account of language, you need to reckon with the inter-connectedness of these three elements in what sociolinguists call ‘the total linguistic fact’. Certainly, there have been lots of attempts to treat these elements separately both in linguistics and language education, focusing on linguistic form on its own, or leaving out ideology when language form and language use are taken together. But this kind of selective vision certainly doesn’t stop ideology being a huge influence in every classroom, and instead, there’s a good case for reflecting on different ideological possibilities, potentially exploring different formats and configurations (which is what teachers routinely do with linguistic form and interactional activity). Participatory pedagogy is a good example of this kind of active engagement with the ineradicably ideological dimension of communication, and far from being wayward, it is actually grounded in a more open and honest recognition of the total linguistic fact than a lot of other language pedagogies.