Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

The Language Debate 95Guardian in the Education Section, no less claimed that childrenspeaking what he called ‘an East London dialect offshoot’ (whatever thatanimal might be) are ‘lacking entire sounds and words in their vocalrepertoire’. A Sunday Telegraph columnist argued that failing to ‘correct’lower-class grammar was denying children the very ‘right to knowledge’.Lippi-Green (1997) provides many examples of widespread negativeattitudes towards Black English (and other nonstandard dialects) in theUnited States; as we shall see, such attitudes can be just as common amongteachers as among ‘laypersons’, and just as strongly held by nonstandarddialectspeakers themselves as in the public at large.Deficient LanguageSince class and regional differences in accent and dialect have alwaysbeen the source of comment, imitation and derision, it is not difficult tounderstand the appeal of a formal deficit view of certain speech styles.One of the first scholarly attempts (perhaps the first; see Dittmar, 1976) toinvestigate class differences in speech was that of Schatzman and Strauss(1955). Following a tornado in Arkansas, lower- and middle-classrespondents were asked to describe the frightening event. The formergroup were found to transmit much less information about theoccurrence than were the latter. There was little attempt to set the scene,as it were, for the interviewer, and the respondents were apparently ableto do little more than reconstruct the event as it had appeared to themdirectly and personally in ‘particularistic or concrete terms’ (Schatzman& Strauss, 1955: 333). There was much digression, which, though perhapsmeaningful for the speaker, was irrelevant and/or confusing for thelistener. The lower-class interviewees seemed to assume that theinterviewer shared much contextual information when, in fact, thiswas not so. Middle-class informants, by contrast, were generally able toreconstruct the event in a logical and meaningful way. Schatzman andStrauss acknowledged that the lower-class people were communicatingacross class lines (i.e. to a middle-class interviewer) and were probablymore unfamiliar with the requirements of the task important points, aswe shall see. Nevertheless, the investigators felt able to conclude that thisgroup of respondents had a reduced capacity for perceiving andcommunicating abstract thoughts; some, they argued, ‘literally cannottell a straight story or describe a simple incident coherently’ (Schatzman& Strauss, 1955: 336; see also Strauss & Schatzman, 1960).In a related study, Templin (1957) obtained speech samples fromlower- and middle-class white American children (aged between three