Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

The Language Debate 123Somervill & Jacobs, 1972; Thurmond, 1977). Venezky (1970, 1981), a wellknownreading specialist, summarized the matter by noting that, if itcould reliably be shown that provision of nonstandard reading materialswould assist in skill development, there could be no reasonable objection.In the absence of such a demonstration, however, the time and expenseinvolved in the production of these materials seem inappropriate. This isquite apart from the social objections already touched upon, as well asfrom important questions that would inevitably arise about the numberof varieties to be represented in print, the best methods of capturingnonstandard pronunciation on the page, the timing of the transition tostandard-dialect texts, and so on.A variant approach here has argued for the elimination of points ofdialect interference from reading texts; some sort of ‘neutral’ text wasapparently envisaged. This attracts the same general criticisms alreadynoted, but it does alert us to an attitude that has been steadily growing in too ‘politically correct’ a manner, however, some might say sinceBaratz, Torrey and Labov first presented their research results. It issimply that the deletion of certain features that are strongly andspecifically associated with given social groups might be useful: more‘culture-free’ or ‘culture-fair’ books, in other words. Such a practicecould lead to stories stripped of all color and style, could be pressed intothe service of retroactive ‘cleansing’, could be bowdlerization but itcould also produce more broadly useful materials (see Vick, 1974). It hasalready been used extensively, particularly with regard to genderdescriptions and stereotypes. Of course, this is not in the service ofnonstandard textbooks.The most reasonable approach, in fact, tends to be almost a nonapproach.Texts continue to be written in more or less standard dialect,but children are allowed to recite and reproduce meanings in their owndialect (see Simons, 1974; Venezky, 1970), or accent (‘there is no reasonwhy a person cannot learn to read Standard English texts quite well in anonstandard pronunciation’: Labov, 1972: 289). This point of view buildsupon the experimental evidence concerning sentence repetition (as notedabove): that is, children are likely to repeat material, standard ornonstandard, in their maternal dialect. The assumption is that thenonstandard-dialect-speaking child’s decoding abilities (i.e. extractingthe meaning from print on the page) will lead to encoding what hasbeen read (e.g. reading aloud) in a nonstandard format.It is also consistent with a difference view of nonstandard speech andlanguage, of course. As we have increasingly come to realize the validityand the completeness of nonstandard dialects, so it follows that there is