• Understand the shape of sociolinguistic research today: its goals, concepts and terminology.
• Design and conduct sociolinguistic research in both macro- and micro-sociolinguistic areas, following the social science paradigm of hypothesis development and testing through empirical data.
• Take opportunities to reflect on and discuss your own sociolinguistic situation – the profusion of languages and voices which are part of your life.
• Consider the universality of sociolinguistic principles and the extent to which they apply cross-linguistically, by considering research from multiple languages and communities.
• Read, consider and discuss how language affects and constitutes society, in particular where that produces inequity.
• Learn to observe, question, and integrate information from different sources (multiple readings, lecture, your own experiences) to test generalizations about how language and society connect.
• Develop writing styles, empirical techniques and skills specialized to sociolinguistic research norms.

adapted from the course textbook (Bell 2014:15)

This course within the Linguistics curriculum

This is one of the five required "breadth" courses for LIN majors and specialists. These are designed to provide (second-year) students with semester-long introductions to widely-studied areas of linguistics. In this course, you will learn about sociolinguistics through a range of approaches, hypotheses, languages and communities. More advanced courses will specialize in only some of these.

LIN 251 is the first in a series of sociolinguistics courses.
It's the prereq for LIN351: Sociolinguistic Patterns, which provides an in-depth course about data collection and analysis methods and deepens your skill set from LIN 251.
LIN351, in turn, prepares your for LIN 451: Urban Dialectology and LIN 456: Language Variation and Change: Theory and Analysis.
LIN251 also prepares you for LIN355: Language and Gender.

As a "TBB" ("Thought, Belief and Behaviour") course, LIN 251 provides training in analysis methods, as well as reading and writing specialized for the social sciences.