The worldwide enterprise of English Language Teaching (ELT) has consciously attended to social rules and conventions in its modelling of language use. In this article I will first examine the theoretical basis of the “social” as it has been understood in influential curriculum discussions and internationally marketed textbooks. It will be shown that there is a tendency to portray social conventions of language use in terms of abstracted and decontextualised native speaker norms. Drawing on data collected in ethnolinguistically diverse school and university classrooms in London, I will illustrate that socially agreeable ways of language use are fluidly and sensitively negotiated in situ by participants. Some of the observations and arguments in this article will resonate with the analytic sensibilities shown in recent research in the fields of English as a Lingua Franca and sociolinguistics. The discussion will conclude with a call for a more empirically oriented approach to conceptualizing the “social” in ELT that takes account of situated language and social practices.
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Constant Leung (2013) studied this question.