LANGUAGE V ARIATION IN THE CYPRIOT LANGUAGE CLASSROOM AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION* STAVROULA TSIPLAKOU, UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS Abstract This paper examines aspects of linguistic variation, broadly conceived, in contexts involving both actual language teaching and discourse, or discourses, on language teaching or mother-tongue education in Greek-speaking Cyprus. An attempt is made to relate actual linguistic practices and discourses on these practices to linguistic, sociolinguistic and (critical) discourse-analytic approaches to variation, with the following objectives in mind: (i) to construct a (linguistic) model of the type(s) of variation involved, (ii) to show the precise nature of the relationship between the overall model of variation and specific parameters of linguistic/pedagogical practice, and (iii) to determine the ways in which the implications of the above should inform the construction of a viable model of language pedagogy. Keywords: critical literacy, dialect, diglossia, koineization, levelling, polyphony, variation. 1. Introduction The notion of variation lies at the heart of linguistic theory, or at least at the heart of that part of linguistic theory which is not concerned with concepts such as the ‘ideal speaker-listener’; variation is central to the definition of ‘speech community’, to the definition of geographical dialects and sociolects, and to historical linguistics, as part of the exploration of the mechanisms of language change. The (relative) shift of focus from the exploration of linguistic competence to the exploration of communicative competence (Hymes 1972, Fishman 1980) over the last few decades has enriched and refined the concept of variation, as it has led to the consideration of parameters such as style and register and has helped reveal the operative effect of factors such as context of situation and domain (Fishman 1980), mode, field, tenor etc. (Halliday & Hasan 1991) and, crucially, the intermeshing of all of the above in localized communicative events. That variation is “indexical of social negotiations” (Myers-Scotton 2000) is a widely-accepted (and perhaps trivially true) premise in relevant sociolinguistic and ethnographic work. What seems to be at stake in the analysis of different speech-communities or in-groups/social networks and of varying types of face-to face interaction is the particular, localized type of social negotiation involved and its correlation with specific types of variation. This type of intertwining is often particularly difficult to untangle, especially in cases of informal interaction among peers or in-groups, where factors such as the constraints of domain (Fishman 1980) on patterns of linguistic choice are not relevant. Thus, sociolinguistic studies within a social networks approach (Milroy & Milroy 1985) have demonstrated that the choice of language or variety may well represent shifting speaker perspectives on footing, face, status, politeness, interactional alliances and the alignment of each code with a particular end of the power-solidarity axis. The tension between what I term macro- (or sociolinguistic) and micro- (or discourse-analytic/ethnographic) perspectives on variation is perhaps inevitable, given their differential foci, namely the discovery of broader patterns versus the unveiling of the intricacies inherent in localized communicative events (Gumperz 1981). 2. Linguistic variation in relation to the expressed goals of Language Arts programs Within the field of Language Education/Language Arts, which is of particular interest for our purposes, language variation has been addressed in various ways: (i) at what I term the micro-level, as a manifestation of the polyphony inherent in the language classroom; I will not dwell here on the much-used (and much-abused and often solipsistic) notion of Bakhtinian polyphony or even heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1986) as an analytical prime in the exploration of