Abstract：This paper studies English Teaching in China from the perspective of sociolinguistics.It analyses the relation between sociolinguistics and language teaching and points out its enlightenment upon language teaching.It requires that language teachers and teaching designers should pay much attention to the language itself and its related social factors as well.The author demands that we should attach importance to the communicative competence and social culture，emphasize the discourse and contextual teaching.
Key Words：sociolinguistics；foreign language teaching；communicative competence
1 Introduction
Sociolinguistics，as a new and independent edge discipline，mainly studies the relationship between society and language，the position and function of language in society，and how the people in society use the language functions to communicate.In layman’s terms，social linguistics studies the use of language（USES）and users（USERS）.
Social linguistics has a broad and narrow sense.In general，social linguistics looks at language from the perspective of society，and it studies the language selection，standardization language，language culture，speech community and multilingual principle.From the narrow sense，social linguistics looks at language from the perspective of society，and it studies linguistic event，language function，code-variant pragmatics，discourse analysis and gender and so on.
2 The Changes of Foreign Language Teaching
2.1 The Changes of Cultivation Objectives
From the point of view of sociolinguistics，the training objective of a foreign language depends on the role and status of the foreign language in the communicative activities of the country（or group）.Sociolinguistics makes people realize that every language has a variety of languages in terms of the style，scope and the way of language use.Language variation is an inclusive concept.
Sociolinguistics believe that even the native speaker，they can only master the language foundation，which is known as common core.The first language acquisition is so difficult，so it is more difficult for foreign language acquisition.No matter what kind of foreign language teaching， it must have a clear goal，and then determine to learn which scope of foreign language，the requirements for listening speaking and writing reading translation，and the requirements for style.The more accurate and specific the cultivation object is，the more pertinently the teaching of foreign language teaching is.
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