The main course goals are to:

• Provide students with opportunities to view language as a social phenomenon.

• Provide examples and cases from both local and international contexts of language use to explore the relationship between language and society, how language is used, people’s language attitudes and choices.

• Examine factors such as age, gender, social class, status, style and the relationship of these factors to linguistic differentiation and the display of identities.

• Overview the characteristics of macro-level (foreign) language planning and changing approaches to related policy developments.

• Help students develop a greater understanding of the relationship between sociolinguistics and language teaching.