Introduction: Foreign language education has become a significant phenomenon in the present era. Responding to personal or professional needs, people learn a foreign language to qualify for education abroad, to communicate with colleagues in international corporations, or to prepare themselves for travel. In order to understand the eminence of the phenomenon, broad knowledge of the process of language acquisition, second or foreign language education, sociolinguistics, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and specific knowledge of foreign language teaching techniques and methods of measurement and evaluation have become especially important.

Language education is the site where, on the one hand, larger social and political forces are reflected in the kinds of educational opportunities offered to speakers of different language varieties and, on the other, language use mediates their participation in those opportunities and, ultimately, their potential contributions to the larger society. If that is so, then it is also true that the educational choices we make can have a direct impact on the opportunities, participation, and potential contributions of language and minority learners.

Learning an additional language has two main goals; the first goal is to learn the usage and formal properties of the language in order to communicate inside the classroom while the second concerns using the language outside the classroom where the students are engaged in an actual communicative event (Bayyurt, 2013). Success in the second goal is mostly tied to learning socio-linguistic competency i.e., the knowledge of the socio-cultural rules of language and of discourse and using the correct register and appropriate variety in a society. Here is exactly the realm of sociolinguistics.

Current approaches to foreign language education entail an understanding of sociocultural theory and sociolinguistics. New areas of research in English Language Teaching (ELT) include the relationship between ELT and World Englishes (WEs), English as an International Language (EIL) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). The schools of WEs, EIL and ELF emerge as a result of the interaction between people (e.g., nonnative speaker-nonnative speaker; native speaker-nonnative speaker) in choosing a common language – i.e., English – to communicate. These trends include the analysis of different genres of written and spoken language emerging in contexts where English is spoken as a native language and also in global contexts where other varieties of English are spoken. All this research requires an understanding of sociolinguistic phenomena such as language registers, varieties, context, pragmatic universals, modes of interaction between people, and so on. Hence, it is important to note that foreign language teaching in a broader sense involves the teaching of successful communication in L2 through the use of correct register or appropriate variety, where to use the correct register or variety, and so on.

In the globalized world, to sustain good relationships with others, a common language ensuring communication across borders is necessary. To develop widespread foreign language proficiency, it is important to promote positive attitudes towards the language to be taught. Teaching a foreign language is difficult, even impossible, if the learners have negative attitudes towards the target language, the nationality of the language teachers, or the teaching context. For this reason, investigating existing attitudes towards the target language and the development of methods and materials that promote positive are worthwhile endeavors. In this regard, the integration of culture into foreign language instruction helps learners to understand unfamiliar concepts by meeting them in context, and thus the learning of the language is enhanced.

All of the definitions of sociolinguistics indicate that it is a field that connects sociology and linguistics. In other words, it is a subfield of sociology that investigates how language usage shapes the linguistic needs of a particular society. Every culture has acceptable linguistic codes deemed appropriate for interaction. Moreover, sociolinguistics demonstrates how social groups within a society can be differentiated by various factors such as ethnicity, religion, gender, age, education level, and social status and how these factors are used to categorize individuals into distinct social classes. Generally, the study of language in its social context is a modern linguistic approach because linguists today recognize that language is inherently a social phenomenon.

According to Bayyut (2013), the significance of sociolinguistic in foreign language education is examined along three dimensions: Attitudes towards learning a foreign language, inclusion of culture in foreign language lessons, and the contribution of language planning to foreign language education. Curriculum and instruction can be arranged to promote positive attitudes toward the foreign language to be learned and nationalities associated with the language. Inclusion of cultural elements in the foreign language curriculum helps learners to understand new language concepts and provides a context for their use. The basic theoretical features of sociolinguistics and the context of its practice lend foreign language education its rich social content. To illustrate, when one considers language education in a school context, noting student-teacher interactions alongside educational components of teaching and learning, the significance of social interactions is readily perceived. Regarding communications functions, the application of sociolinguistics in a classroom context can contribute enormously to the development of foreign language teaching techniques.

Sociolinguistics also ably lead the learners to speak in appropriate social context, therefore, it is very important to the teachers to introduce the sociolinguistics through teaching language materials in order the students will have knowledge of relationship language and social context. They may just not focus on how to speak fluently but speak appropriately is needed too. So much of actual communication is beyond knowing just words and grammar, and without considering communication in its entirety, the learners will never really fluent in another language. Each language is used within different contexts by different people and for different reason and when learning language, it is important to consider those factors to effectively communicate with others. Therefore, the teachers have to determine all facets linked to use of a language either speaking or written. The teachers cannot hope to transform their students’ sociolinguistic competence overnight, but by contextualize the presentation of language, regularly reviewing the impact of social and cultural factors on language and including lessons with a functional approach, teachers can hope to increase the sociolinguistic awareness of their students. These things need not be introduced as isolated exercises, but a context and social aspect could be incorporated to most exercises and examples. Current trends in sociolinguistics studies suggest that literacy activities in the classroom should foster the kinds of collaborative approaches to literacy that exists in the community. These studies also point out that findings concerning the cultural norms and meanings of a variety of speech events in particular target speech communities can guide curricular content for language programs, but simultaneously there should be cautions that some levels of social and cultural meaning (such as the social meaning of linguistic variation) are virtually impossible to teach in foreign language teaching situations and, further, that in auxiliary language teaching situations, the culture of the native speech community may be largely irrelevant to and even unwanted by the learners.

Keyword: Educational Sociolinguistics, Sociolinguistics and Literacy, Sociolinguistics and bilingualism, Sociolinguistics and lesson planning