Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

120 Language Diversity in the Classroomliving in Texas) were held by both black and white teachers. This suggeststhat simply employing more teachers from traditionally disadvantagedgroups may not lighten the evaluative load borne by children at school.In fact, it is very likely that, whatever their personal backgrounds,teachers become socialized into middle-class ways. 7The overall implication here is clear. Like everyone else, teachersmaintain stereotyped and often prejudicial views of certain languagevarieties and their speakers. In one sense, then, the data documentingtheir attitudes merely reflect a specific aspect of a general phenomenon.But teachers’ views are, of course, rather special because of the positionthey occupy in the lives of disadvantaged children. Beyond thedemonstration (in the early studies mentioned above, and in manyothers) that speech patterns can influence teachers’ evaluations ofchildren, there is also the suggestion that the attitudes behind suchassessments may affect children’s educational progress. This is whatlends a special poignancy to the discussion an extension of which willbe found in Chapter 8.Reading MattersThe discussion so far has argued for the linguistic validity of alldialects and, as a consequence, for their acceptance in the classroom andelsewhere. This says nothing, however, about the practical utility ofexpanding repertoires, about adding some facility in standard forms tononstandard maternal varieties. There are, after all, social conventionsthat are not likely to change in the near future, and these have the greatand very important power of translating difference into deficit socialdeficit only, perhaps, and deficit based upon misinformation andprejudice, but deficit nonetheless. A social convention that is easier todefend, having its ground in practicality, involves the language ofreading and writing. Here, a good case can obviously be made for acommon standard. It is a fair objection that this may favor those whoseoral fluency is in the standard dialect, but for all children evenstandard-speaking children formal learning is required to move fromspoken language to print. The evidence suggests that the effort involvedhere is not, in fact, appreciably more for nonstandard-dialect speakers.In this connection and reminding us of points made earlier in thischapter Torrey (1973: 68) noted that:the difference in phonology between Standard English and BlackEnglish is not directly relevant to reading. All children who learn toread English have to break a fairly complex code of sound-spelling