Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Evaluative Reactions to the Language of Disadvantage 155language learning at school. They embed their findings in the broadereducational context in which boys are gradually becoming the gender ofconcern because they are more uninterested, disaffected and disadvantaged.Sommers (2000) provides a more polemical treatment of thisbroader context; see also Heining-Boynton and Haitema (2007) andLindsay and Muijs (2006), as well as the discussions of boys’ attitudes inthe Ebonics section, below. Ewing (2006) and Younger and Warrington(2006) provide some cautionary notes, based on analyses in Russian,British and other European settings.It would seem obvious that the masculine directness that is the basis ofcovert prestige would be less attractive to girls and women. Indeed, theyare generally found to be more disposed towards standard, middle-classstyles; a ‘classic’ study here is that of Fischer (1958). Thus, they have beenseen by some to produce ‘politer’ and more ‘correct’ speech than do theirmale counterparts. A greater linguistic insecurity among women hasoften been considered central here, an insecurity that may rest upon amore pronounced status-consciousness, coupled with a traditional lackof social definition for women (as opposed to men, with occupationaldefinitions to sustain them; see Labov, 2006; Trudgill 1972, 2000). Lateranalyses have, unsurprisingly, suggested that the picture is rather morecomplicated than that; beyond the well-known general work of Brownand Levinson (1987) another so-called ‘classic’ there are valuable andmore recent summaries by Coates (1996, 2004), Crawford (1995) andHolmes (1995). Mills (2003) provides an interesting discussion thatinterweaves considerations of ‘politeness’ and ‘nonstandardness’ withinthe context of social power and its negotiation. Lakoff’s (1975) importantwork on women’s language has now been supplemented by discussionsof men’s language (Coates, 2003; Johnson & Meinhof, 1997); and Watts(2003) and Hickey and Stewart (2005) place the topic in broadestperspective, going beyond gender contexts per se. Salkie (2004: 29) hasrecently noted that ‘politeness is what in the language field we call aWhelk (What every linguist knows)’, and it is certainly the case thatstudies in politeness and its ramifications have increased dramatically inthe last two decades. What is more important, however, as revealed inthe approaches of several of the books just cited, is that studies of genderand-languagerelationships particularly those bearing upon differentialusage of ‘correct’ or ‘standard’ speech are now increasingly likely totreat both genders under the same roof. This is a welcome developmentfrom earlier work, in which the language of one gender was taken as abaseline from which to assess that of the other: need I specify which wasdeemed to set the general baseline?