Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

148 Language Diversity in the Classroomintelligence, ambition, industriousness and competence are the issue;another is that this relationship seems to obtain both for members of thelow-prestige group and for more middle-class speakers. In related work,Ryan and Carranza (1975) found similar results when considering theevaluations of standard English and Mexican-accented English made byMexican-American, black and ‘anglo’ speakers: the former was assessed ashigher in status than the latter. In a further refinement, Ryan et al. (1977)found that the degree of nonstandardness influenced judges’ evaluations.Ratings of Spanish-English bilinguals, reading an English passage, showedthat favorability of impressions decreased as degree of Spanish accentednessincreased. Studies from the same period involving black Americanspeakers are also suggestive. Tucker and Lambert (1969), for example,presented a number of different American English dialect varieties to threegroups of university students northern white, southern white andsouthern black and found that all groups evaluated standard-Englishspeakers most favorably.The relevant literature here, largely from the 1960s and 1970s, whensuch work was at its apogee, is an extensive one and it confirms what hasbeen well understood at a popular level for a long time. The speechpatterns of regional speakers, of ethnic minority-group members, oflower- or working-class populations (categories that frequently overlap,of course) elicit negative evaluations, most importantly in terms ofperceived status, prestige or ‘educatedness’, and this stereotypic patternseems to hold whether or not the listeners are standard speakersthemselves. Some of these early studies, undertaken before the morerecent emergence of black or Hispanic ‘pride’, do reveal hints oflinguistic and psychological developments to come. Flores and Hopper(1975), for instance, found slight preferences on the part of Mexican-American judges for the speech styles of compañeros who referred tothemselves as ‘Chicano’. But it would be naïve to assume that negativelanguage stereotypes are generally waning in a broad societal sense. Thefeeling that one’s own speech is not ‘good’ has historically been a verycommon phenomenon indeed, for reasons that are as clear as they areunfair. It is a particularly disturbing one, however, when we considerhow easily the belief may be exacerbated by those who might beexpected to know better: teachers, for instance. As Halliday (1968: 165)once observed:A speaker who is made ashamed of his own language habits suffers abasic injury as a human being; to make anyone, especially a child,