TY - JOUR AB - NOTES AND DISCUSSION LANGUAGE-LEARNING AND SOCIOLINGUISTICS D. E. Ager Introduction The differences between the use speakers make of a language in different areas of a country, or in one social class as opposed to another, are nowadays recognised as essential parts of a description of a language. There has been much work in sociolinguistics, and continuous cross-fertilisation between sociology, anthropology and linguistics to show this - Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Sebeok 1974; Trudgill 1974. But there is also a continuing awareness by teachers that progress beyond the elementary stage of language acquisition requires the development of sensitivity to the appropriateness of language use to communication situation -Jakobovits: 1970 and Campbell and Wales: 1970. Two particular reasons may have much to do with this changing level of interest -- as Martinet put it (in Weinreich: 1953: vii): There was a time when the progress of research required that each community should be considered linguistically self-contained and homogeneous ... (this assumption) has enabled scholars ... to achieve ... some rigour in a research involving man's psychic activity. For Chomsky also it was necessary to distinguish between the idealised speaker/hearer's intuitive knowledge of his language and the actual speaker or hearer's TI - NOTES AND DISCUSSION JF - IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching DO - 10.1515/iral.1976.14.3.285 DA - 1976-01-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/de-gruyter/notes-and-discussion-dBSH8Heomf SP - 285 EP - 304 VL - 14 IS - 3 DP - DeepDyve ER -