Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Evaluative Reactions to the Language of Disadvantage 147criticisms that have been made of the ‘matched-guise’ technique, none ofwhich are fatal, see Edwards, 1989.)In this initial study, Lambert and his colleagues were interested in thereactions of French- and English-speaking Montreal students towardsFrench and English voices. On most of the dimensions evaluated(ambition, intelligence, sense of humor, etc.), English-speaking judgesreacted more favorably to English guises. Of greater interest, however,were the ratings given by the French-speaking raters, for not only did they,too, evaluate the English guises more positively than they did the Frenchones, they also gave less favorable responses to the French guises than didEnglish-speaking judges. The researchers interpreted these findings asevidence of what they then termed a ‘minority-group reaction’. That is, theFrench-speaking student judges, perceiving themselves as subordinate insome ways to the English-speaking population, apparently adopted (andeven slightly magnified) the stereotyped values of this latter group. Britishmatched-guise work lent some support here: Cheyne (1970) found thatboth Scottish and English judges tended to rate Scottish speakers as lowerin status than their English counterparts.d’Anglejan and Tucker (1973), in their study of French dialects, providedfurther confirmation of the ‘minority-group’ effect (not using matchedguises). When French-Canadian students, teachers and factory workers(more than 200 in total) were asked their opinions of Quebec, Europeanand Parisian French, they rejected the idea that Quebec French was inferiorto the other two, or that Parisian French was the ‘best’ form of thelanguage. Nevertheless, when presented with the taped voices of upperclassand lower-class French-Canadian speakers, and European Frenchspeakers, the respondents downgraded both Canadian styles in terms ofqualities like ambition and intelligence; even in terms of likeability, theEuropean speech style evoked more favorable responses. In 1975,Carranza and Ryan asked Mexican-American and Anglo-Americanstudents (of Spanish) to judge speakers of English and Spanish. Sixteensuch speakers were presented, on tape, talking about simple domestic orschool events. The personality characteristics to be evaluated broadlyreflected either prestige (status) or what the researchers termed ‘solidarity’(involving traits like friendliness, kindness, trustworthiness and so on).Over all judges, English was viewed more favorably when the speaker’stopic was school-related, Spanish when it dealt with domestic matters.Further, English was reacted to more favorably on both status-related and‘solidarity’ traits. One implication is that a low-prestige language varietymay have more positive connotations in terms of qualities like integrity,social attractiveness and friendliness than it does when matters of