Sociolinguistics and Foreign Language Teaching

The present article is intended to discuss the influence of sociolinguistics and the insight it sheds on foreign language teaching. Sociolinguistics studies language mainly through the study of the social factors. This study method exerts strong influence on foreign language teaching, especially in the training of the students' communicative competence, and the teaching of foreign languages through culture and texts. First, the present article gives a brief introduction to the basic theory and methods of sociolinguistics, and then it discusses the communicative method, the cultural method and text method in foreign language teaching inspired by sociolinguistics.