Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

114 Language Diversity in the Classroomthe literature, it was not the earliest formal demonstration of thelinguistic validity of that dialect. The work of Lorenzo Dow Turner(1949) has been unjustifiably neglected until relatively recently (see the‘biographical dedication’ to Turner in Holloway & Vass, 1997; see also hisentry in Stammerjohann, 1996), and it is not unfair to suggest that part ofthe reason for this neglect is that Turner was himself a black scholar. Heis now, however, receiving some greater measure of attention, and hisinvestigations of the Gullah dialect of South Carolina are increasinglyrecognized for the pioneering efforts, in both focus and scope, which theyso obviously were. Whatever the ultimate assessment of the ‘Africanness’of BEV may be, Turner’s work on creolization will remain pivotal.Labov was certainly, however, among the earliest scholars to systematicallyrefute the ‘deficit’ viewpoint, and his now-classic assault on‘verbal deprivation’ appeared in 1969. He illustrates how interactionstypically involving white middle-class interviewers and apprehensiveblack youngsters made ‘defensive, monosyllabic’ responses very predictableand, conversely, how easy it was to dramatically increase theamount of speech produced by creating a more relaxed setting. Thegeneral suggestion, simply, is that ‘verbal deprivation’ is an artifact ofinappropriate techniques. Labov also notes the important distinctionbetween the comprehension of a statement and its reproduction. Bymeans of a simple experiment, in which a child hears a statement and isasked to repeat it, he shows that a black child who hears ‘I asked Alvin ifhe knows how to play basketball’ might well repeat it as ‘I ax Alvin do heknow how to play basketball’ or perhaps ‘I axt Alvin does he know howto play basketball’. While such ‘errors’ are fuel for deficit theorists, itbecomes clear that they simply reflect the regularities (in grammar andpronunciation) of the child’s dialect, and are not substandard attempts toimitate the patterns of the more ‘standard’ variety. With regard to basiccognition and the grasp of meaning, it is clear that there is no deficiency:the child has understood the sentence and has then reproduced it in afamiliar form (see also Marwit, 1977; Marwit et al., 1972). The insight herewas strengthened by Baratz (1969), whose study showed that whitechildren make similar alterations between what is heard and what isreplied: given the sentence ‘Do Deborah like to play wif the girl...?’, mostrepeated it as ‘Does Deborah like to play with the girl...?’Labov also questioned the basic idea that Bernstein’s elaborated codewas in fact the more desirable of the two, noting that the most desirablelanguage is often the simplest, and that lower-class speech can be moredirect and powerful than the hesitant and qualified style of the middleclass: often ‘turgid, redundant and empty’ (Labov, 1969: 34). In general