Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

The Persistence of Linguistic Deficit 139undercuts all attempts to pervert or manipulate the idea. It is simply this.All human communities are speaking communities, and everything weknow about cognitive capacity and social development makes it botheasier and more logical to assume that they all have languages that servetheir purposes. A bizarre opposite assertion would be that the languagesof some groups are flawed, that (for example) a group might lack thelinguistic capacity to fully discuss, up to the level of its conceptualknowledge, the trees and bushes in its environment.To put it another way: given what is known about human cognitivedevelopment, the ‘rule-governed’ hypothesis that is (or ought to be) atthe heart of all discussions of ‘equality’ makes much more intrinsic sensethan some ‘haphazard’ one and this, regardless of any specificempirical observation at all. For what group, wherever and however itmay live, could maintain itself adequately with an incomplete orinconsistent communication system? These adjectives reflect exactly thesort of illegitimate cross-group comparison that, as we have seen,animates the very idea of ‘disadvantage’.Empirical ExcursionsAccompanying the popular and theoretical persistence of ‘deficit’perspectives are findings of an empirical nature. Many of these are, eitherdirectly or implicitly, related to Bernstein’s influence which, in itsembrace of both researchers and teachers, has traveled far beyond theEnglish-language sphere. Thus, for example, well after the initialassertions underpinning the ‘difference’ position, Gordon (1978) lookedat the impact of Bernstein’s writings upon a sample of primary-schoolteachers in Suffolk. They reported that deficit theory had been a part oftheir training courses, and that it expressed and reinforced ideas alreadywidely current among teachers. A few of the teachers made criticalremarks, but only those who had actually read papers by and aboutBernstein were skeptical or critical. Those whose awareness was moreinformally derived were the most accepting of it. This is a fascinating andsuggestive detail. When we consider that close and direct examinationmay lead to an awareness of the theoretical fragility of the ‘codes’, thefact that most teachers (like the rest of us) absorb new ideas rather lessstraightforwardly becomes a salient one indeed. One implication is,surely, that teachers ought to be given more opportunity for focusedstudy, for opportunities to see that some emperors have a limitedwardrobe.