AN OVERVIEW TO THE ROLE OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING

Abstract

   There have been many factors leading to successful second language teaching and learning, among which is sociolinguistic competence – people’s ability to use the second language (L2) appropriately in different cultural and social contexts. The paper presents an overview of sociolinguistics and analyses its importance in the L2 development and second language learning (SLL). A number of sociolinguistic issues then are discussed to provide further explanations for the critical role of sociolinguistics in SLL through an analysis of empirical studies in this field. The last part of the paper argues for the values of sociolinguistic competence to any language users and shows how to integrate sociolinguistic components into L2 teaching and learning to help students become effective language users in diverse, complicated social situations.