Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

130 Language Diversity in the Classroomcontinuing force of deficit perspectives. In an impressive collectiondevoted to the ‘debate’ over standard English, the editors note at the verybeginning that the need for discussion ‘became even more pressing afterthe publication of Honey’s Language is Power (1997) with its peculiarmixture of half truths and ad hominem arguments’ (Bex & Watts, 1999:1). In fact, as we shall see very shortly, the most contentious aspects ofHoney’s book are reworkings and restatements of material he hadintroduced years before. Honey’s writing would probably not haveattracted much academic attention, were it not for the considerablecoverage it received in the popular media. This coverage was largelyfavorable, because Honey was often seen as a champion of ‘proper’English, daring to break academically imposed taboos, an unapologeticand provocative critic of the prevailing ‘liberal orthodoxy’ in education.‘You can’t pull the wool over Professor Honey’s ears’, said the Mail onSunday. 4 Furthermore, most of the journalistic accolades emerged frompolitically right-wing stances, and so most of the academic constituency certainly that segment that had worked hard to eradicate narrow andessentially reactionary interpretations of language that translated differencesinto deficits were put on their guard. Cameron (1995: 86) notesthe ‘respectful’ media attention given to what was seen as Honey’s‘daring’ and ‘iconoclastic’ assault upon the prevailing orthodoxy; shethen clarifies the difficulty that faced the academic community, and thatprompted it to respond:To the extent that Marenbon or Honey can air their value judgementsopenly, whereas their opponents in linguistic science are moreconstrained by the norm of objectivity, the polemical advantage lieswith the conservatives, and the linguists are likely to lose theargument. (Cameron, 1995: 100)(The Marenbon to whom Cameron refers here produced a pamphlet[1987] in which he argued for the superiority of standard English, andthat grammar ‘prescribes by describing’ [Marenbon, 1987: 20]: descriptiveefforts create norms which should then be prescribed.)Honey’s various assaults on current linguistic ideas (1983a, 1989, 1997)make for interesting reading. In the first of these, a rather notoriouspamphlet, he claimed that work supporting the position that all languagevarieties are equally valid systems work, that is, supporting the‘difference’ position was without any firm basis. Furthermore, heconsidered it pernicious since, in the current climate of unease withthe allegedly low standards of written and spoken English, such workacted to undermine attempts to raise these standards. 5 Disadvantaged