Everything is in Context

By January 27, 2016 BlogPost No Comments

I think one of the most interesting things brought up in the Street reading was the idea of the broadness of context. In the section titled “’Context’ In Linguistics and Anthropology,” Street brings up the school of thought in sociolinguistics that context is “so unbounded and loose that it would swamp their own very precise and bounded studies” (Street 439). This really stuck out to me because in all of my classes this quarter we are so engrossed in this idea of context and how everything must be taken into context to understand the greater networks of things. But sometimes this whole idea of context does “swamp” (439) the entire analysis of things and almost stops us from searching for answers.

In my Teaching English as a Second Language class my professor’s favorite joke is that the answer to everything is “it depends.” It depends on the context of the student – their home life, their motivations for learning, their learning style, etc. This obsession with context almost gets in the way of searching for answers, while at the same time it must be taken into consideration because nothing really happens in isolation – and especially not literacy. So I’m really wondering if any of you have had similar experiences in classes with the problems of the broadness of context?

Leave a Reply