Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Introduction 7maintain. There is ample evidence that the inaccurate language attitudesoften held by beginning teachers who are, after all, members ofsocieties in which stereotypes abound are reinforced in a school culturethat, like the larger community outside its gates, has traditionallyencouraged (‘privileged’ would be the word many use nowadays)what is ‘standard’. These attitudes, it has been suggested, are oftenstrong enough that new teachers will ‘hear’ minority-group children’sspeech as nonstandard even if, in fact, it is not. Finally here, to makematters a little more poignant, there is some evidence to suggest that someyounger teachers are initially more inclined to believe the ‘different-butnot-deficient’argument about nonstandard varieties: how sad, then, ifthat encouraging initial insight becomes overwhelmed by the existingculture of the school (see Corson, 2001; Edwards, 1986; Fasold, 1984; seealso the fleshing-out of these matters in the chapters following).Brouwer and Korthagen (2005) have discussed aspects of this in alengthy review. They note, at the outset, that ‘occupational socializationin schools is a known factor counteracting attempts at educatinginnovative teachers’ (Brouwer & Korthagen, 2005: 153). This is onepole of the problem, as it were: teachers, like the rest of us, are verysusceptible to the cognitive and emotional tone of their surroundings. Itis not to be doubted that such susceptibility is correlated with vaguenessor ignorance, so that the issues on which one is least informed are likelyto be those most prone to influence. A corollary is that attempts toreplace ignorance with awareness are likely to act as inoculations againstlater susceptibility. To make this more specific: providing new teacherswith accurate linguistic information about the competence of their pupilsmay disrupt a chain of ignorance and misinformation that is otherwiselikely to continue. This brings me to the second pole. As Brouwer andKorthagen (2005: 153) observe, some studies have shown that the ‘effectsof teacher education on the actual practices of teachers are generallymeager’. The implication here, then, is that the provision of linguistic andpsychological information must be done well in order to have any chanceof becoming that ‘inoculation’. Fortunately, as I have already noted, it isnot especially difficult to present the relevant findings in a digestiblemanner. Fortunate, but again a little sad, inasmuch as so much morecould have easily been accomplished already.Corson draws attention to the need for improved teacher sensitivityand to the benefits of having more ethnic-group members as teachers;above all, however, he echoes one of my opening concerns here (or, moreaccurately, one aspect of a broader concern). He remarks that ‘classroomrelatedwork on non-standard varieties is still in its infancy’ (Corson,