Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

The Persistence of Linguistic Deficit 127precisely so as to facilitate that same enterprise: an imposition of theminimal order, that is to say, required for educational development tooccur. (I don’t deny, of course, the existence of some modern incarnationsof Dotheboys Hall nor, more realistically, do I deny that many classroomsare not in practice what they should be in theory.) In fact, where thehome-school discontinuity fuelling disadvantage is not as serious as isoften imagined, this is probably due more to the fact that the workingclassfamily is unlike its stereotyped representation in the literature thanto the assumption that schools are closer to that stereotype and moreremoved from middle-class values.In accepting that some speech styles are simply wrong, schools have ofcourse reflected extra-mural deficit views of disadvantage in general andof language in particular. These views, incidentally, have been remarkablysimilar across social groups, for it is a commonplace and, after amoment’s thought, the psychology here is not difficult to comprehend that those with socially stigmatized speech styles often come to accept‘mainstream’ perceptions of their low status and deficiency. The school’srole in linguistic disadvantage has been a circularly reinforcing one:children arrive speaking a variety that is considered deficient; teachers,acting from the best of (ill-founded) motives, aim to replace this with astandard variety; they may also make attributions, based upon theirperceptions of speech, about the intelligence, educability and likelyscholastic progress of their pupils. The vicious circle implicit in Rist’s(1970) famous ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ is completed when children,treated differently because of presumed deficiencies, do in fact come toperform less well than others.There is little doubt that, in many jurisdictions, schools are more tolerantof language variation today than they once were; again, this is related toattitudes beyond the school gates more liberal ones, in this case. 1 But‘tolerance’ rarely rests upon whole-hearted acceptance. Contemporaryassessments of ‘social inclusion’, of the evils of ‘marginalization’ and‘stigmatization’, of the inequities marked by race and class these, ratherthan more fundamental shifts in belief and understanding, may be theoperative principles at work in many instances. I shall suggest below thatthere has, in fact, been little real movement beyond deficit perspectives. 2Beyond the classroom, of course, it is clear to anyone with ears to hear (oreyes to read: in the letters-to-the-editor sections of the newspaper, forinstance) that perceptions of ‘poor’ English have not disappeared.Linguistic evidence of the Labovian sort does not work very fast or verycompletely on popular stereotypes; and attitudes, by their psychologicalnature, can be doggedly resistant to unpalatable fact.