Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

100 Language Diversity in the Classroomshares background information with the teller (i.e. has seen the samepictures); the reader will recall that this was a communicative obstacleremarked upon by Schatzman and Straus. In this case, however, asStubbs (1983), Trudgill (1975) and Coulthard (1969) all pointed out, theexperimenter was present when the children constructed their stories,and thus did see the pictures. One might quite reasonably argue,therefore, that the working-class version was more appropriate in acontext in which both speaker and listener had the same information infront of them.An equation of working-class language with inferior language isespecially unfortunate even within the confines of Bernstein’s owntheoretical space when it is realized that (for example) working-classchildren can use elaborated code under some circumstances. This iseasily demonstrated. In British investigations undertaken at the height ofBernstein’s influence, Robinson (1965) found that the grammatical usagesof working-class children writing formal letters were not markedlydifferent from those of their middle-class counterparts. Rushton andYoung (1975) reported that class differences were influenced by thecontext of the task (in their study, different essay topics: imaginative,opinionative or technical). The most interesting studies here, however,are American ones.In a series of investigations with black children, Marwit and associates(Marwit, 1977; Marwit & Marwit, 1973, 1976; Marwit & Neumann, 1974;Marwit et al., 1972) demonstrated that the understanding and the use of standard English develops over the course of the primary-schoolgrades. This does not imply any abandonment of maternal speechpatterns. It is, rather an illustration of early and growing awareness of thedifferences, both substantive and evaluative, between standard andnonstandard varieties, and of the differential appropriateness of thesevarieties in specific contexts (see also Day, 1982; Gay & Tweney, 1976).More recent research continues to confirm the connection: Tannen et al.(1997) found that older nonstandard-speaking children can easily shift tothe standard when the context suggests it.In this connection, Piestrup (1973) reported that, when white teachersstigmatized the use of nonstandard language in the classroom, thechildren’s use of Black English actually increased, or became moreemphasized. The opposite was true in classrooms where teachers didnot ‘punish’ the use of nonstandard forms. Beyond the facilitation ofstandard-dialect use per se, it is easy to see that acceptance ofnonstandard dialects at school will likely increase the general ‘comfort’level of the students, and this can be expected to produce educational