Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

The Language Debate 107Throughout the program, it is apparent that the authors’ conception ofthe language of disadvantaged children is startlingly inaccurate. Toanticipate later arguments a bit: Labov (1969) observed that the authors’belief that usages like ‘they mine’ is incorrect and illogical reveals a lackof awareness of Black English grammar, in which the deletion of thepresent-tense copula verb (‘are’, in this case) is a regularity. Labov alsopointed to their unfortunate dismissal of ‘In the tree’ as an illogicalanswer to the teacher’s question, ‘Where is the squirrel?’ Everyone usessuch economical elliptical statements and, in fact, their use clearly showsthat the listener has paid close attention to the grammatical context of thequestion.Another well-known American project for disadvantaged blackchildren was that of Klaus and Gray (1968; see also Gray & Klaus,1970). Characterizing the children’s home life as noisy, disorganized andinadequate for the ‘proper’ development of cognitive skills, the authorsacknowledge their debt to Bernstein. They define the restricted code as:one in which most of the meaning must be carried by other aspects ofthe total situation: facial expression, intonation rather than wordsspoken, the circumstances. The child, thus, does not learn to uselanguage effectively. (Klaus & Gray, 1968: 8)(Indeed, the essence of this quotation is traceable to Bernstein’s earliestpaper on class and language.)Overall, early (pre-1970) programs of compensatory education weregenerally built upon linguistic-deficit theory, and often displayed someacquaintance with Bernstein’s work in particular. This is true not only forthe individual programs just touched upon here, but also for the massiveAmerican Head Start project, an intervention designed to give poorchildren pre-school experience that would allow them to enter theregular school itself on a more equal footing. Springing from PresidentJohnson’s ‘War on Poverty’ in 1965, and fuelled by Coleman’s (1966)report on equality of educational opportunity (see also Jencks, 1972),Head Start was soon dealing with hundreds of thousands of children.As the deficit perspective waned, however, later educational interventionslooked somewhat more enlightened at least, the term‘compensatory education’ was increasingly seen as inappropriate, undercutby the insights of the ‘difference’ position. In Britain, for example, thePlowden Report (1967) focused attention upon the problems of childrenin urban areas and recommended the identification of ‘educationalpriority areas’ on the basis of a number of visible criteria including largefamily size, receipt of state benefits and poor housing. Virtually all