Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

The Language Debate 101benefits of all kinds (see Nero, 2006; Rickford & Rickford, 1995; Siegel,2006, 2007). All of this is surely a specific example of a very general rule:the best way to expedite the learning of something new is to start withwhat children bring with them, to build upon existing competence andpractice. With particular regard to language, it is clear that since allvarieties, standard or nonstandard, have symbolic as well as communicativefunctions, to denigrate or dismiss them is to threaten or belittlean important marker of group solidarity; this is an important matter towhich I shall return.The early work showing that lower-class children could, after all, useBernstein’s more ‘elaborated’ codes is, in fact, evidence for the commonphenomenon of ‘bidialectalism’, which, indeed, typically involvesvarieties of higher and lower prestige. The more standard format canbe expected in formal or extra-group interactions, the more nonstandardmedium in contexts of familiarity and intimacy. Both have their uses,which explains why one generally does not drive out the other. Theremay be compelling social reasons, for instance, for the maintenance oflow-prestige varieties. Speicher and McMahon (1992) report on the peerpressure among their black informants to use Black English, or risk beinglabeled an ‘oreo’ (a biscuit that is black on the outside, but white in themiddle); among native North Americans the cognate term is ‘apple’,among Asian Americans it is ‘banana’ and so on. This is a specificexample of a much broader phenomenon: the ostracism that can followattempts to leave one’s group and join another.Thus, a generation ago, Carranza and Ryan (1975) noted that MexicanAmericans who abandon Spanish for the socioeconomic rewards ofEnglish may be seen by their friends as vendidos: ‘sell-outs’. The samelabeling was applied to French speakers in Quebec who moved toEnglish; they were vendus. Of course, if one could make a clean andcomplete break, if one could leave behind one life and move seamlesslyinto another, these epithets would lose some of their force, and wouldperhaps reflect only some difficult, but temporary, period of transition.But, it is extremely difficult to make such moves, particularly, of course,when many other things besides language have to be adjusted. Indeed,some things, like skin color, cannot be adjusted at all (Michael Jacksonnotwithstanding). So, the danger is of ending up in some psychosocialno-man’s land, of becoming ‘marginalized’. In that case, labels and theattitudes sustaining them would have real and ongoing force. Suchconsiderations give many people pause.It would, however, be both wrong and incomplete to think that onlynegative possibilities restrain individuals from attempting cultural or