Résumé:
This study investigates aspects of the teaching and learning of sociolinguistic competence in an
EFL setting to university students from an intercultural perspective. Sociolinguistic
competence refers to the learners’ ability to use appropriate target language in various social
contexts. The study focuses on four main aspects of sociolinguistic competence: linguistic
markers of social relations, politeness conventions, register variations, and expressions of folk
wisdom. The investigation took place at the department of English- Khenchela University.
Adopting a quasi- experimental -pre and post-test design-, the research is carried out in three
main phases. In the pre-teaching phase, two questionnaires were conducted to explore the
importance attributed to activities related to sociolinguistic competence and target language
culture from both teachers and students’ perspectives. Two main results were concluded: first,
although teachers stressed the fact that learners’ communicative competence should be
complemented by an understanding of the target culture to enable them maintain
communicative tasks with native speakers, the sociolinguistic component of communicative
competence seems to be deemphasised particularly in one of its essential aspects which is
stylistic variation. Second, students’ revealed a lack of exposure to English language in its
authentic context; yet, they confirmed their willingness to embrace the experience of
intercultural learning.
During the teaching phase, sixty sevens tudents of English in their third year were randomly
assigned to participate in the study. Students had a pre-test to evaluate their sociolinguistic
competence prior involving them in any kind of explicit instructions related to sociolinguistic
competence. Learners in the experimental group (N= 32) were exposed to explicit instruction
about English native speakers’ culture, practicing role plays and exploring sociolinguistic
variables affecting language use. However, learners in the control group (N=35) were taught using
classroom discussions without any explicit focus on sociolinguistic competence. After the end of
the teaching interventions, students in both groups had a post-test to evaluatetheir’ sociolinguistic
competence. In addition to descriptive statistics, an independent-sample t-test was used for data
analysis. The results indicated that students in the experimental group performed at a
statistically significant level in terms of the four components.
Furthermore, in the third stage of the research, findings obtained from the experimental group
interview demonstrated that most learners had a positive perception on this learning
experience, and become more aware of the importance of stylistic variation and appropriate
language use incontexts. Students also recognized that the programme was helpful in
acquiring new expressions and beneficial for developing their communicative competence.
