Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

122 Language Diversity in the Classroomupon the development of reading skills. (I shall pay closer attention to theEbonics debate in a later chapter.) As Rickford notes, however, the studiesto which McWhorter referred were of the quick-and-dirty variety, lackingany ‘time depth’ (see also the earlier observations on this point by Simons& Johnson, 1974). Rickford and Rickford (2005) thus call for renewedattention to bridging materials, and outline the requirements of futureresearch in the area.Whatever the findings of educational researchers are, or will be, thereis considerable evidence from a number of settings showing that manyparents do not want to see their nonstandard language variety inschoolbooks. Their attitudes may be regrettable (reflecting inaccurateassessments of linguistic inferiority), or they may be less than fullyinformed (neglecting, for instance, the possibility of a bidialectalism thatextends to reading), or they may be ‘practical’, at least in some traditional‘time-on-task’ perspective (that is, parents may see the use of such booksas antithetical to their views of the school as an agent of socialadvancement, and likely to delay or impair standard-language abilities).One thing is certain, however: parental attitudes cannot be ignored.Another is that their views may be somewhat more subtle than I havejust implied. Covington (1976) pointed out, for instance, that blackparents in Washington who wanted tolerance of their children’s BEV inthe classroom were, at the same time, strongly opposed to textbookswritten in that variety; similar opinions have been reported by Harberand Bryen (1976) and Venezky (1970).Beyond the social-political objections, criticisms of such educationalinitiatives involving nonstandard textbooks have built upon Torrey’spoint of view (above), arguing that it may simply be unnecessary because while we obviously do not know everything about potential crossdialectalproblems it seems likely that any such interference would beminimal. Trudgill (1975) echoed Torrey in the British context and, in theAmerican one, Labov (1976: 241) further reinforced the point:Some writers seem to believe that the major problem causing readingfailure is structural interference between these two forms of English[BEV and standard]. Our research points in the opposite direction...The number of structures unique to BEV are [sic] small, and it seemsunlikely that they could be responsible for the disastrous record ofreading failure in the inner city schools.Besides the work already cited, a few other experimental studies havealso suggested that reading materials in BEV might be useful, althoughthe findings here are rather inconsistent (see Somervill, 1974, 1975;