Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Evaluative Reactions to the Language of Disadvantage 157aware of these, and this awareness is exemplified, in their own speechpatterns, by adherence to the appropriate norms. Differential accuracy inthe identification of children’s gender can then be seen as a consequenceof these social processes.Teachers’ Views of ‘Disadvantaged’ LanguageIn an early Irish study (Edwards, 1974), 24 teachers of disadvantagedDublin children provided information about their pupils via questionnairesand interviews. In addition, each teacher was given a list of 10traits commonly associated with disadvantaged children in the literature,and was asked to rank these in order of importance as useful andaccurate descriptions of disadvantage. On this ranking task, ‘poorlanguage ability’ was ranked second in importance; only ‘poor livingconditions’ were perceived to be of greater salience when considering theproblems of the disadvantaged child. During the interviews, too, manyteachers mentioned language difficulties of various kinds as an importantaspect of their view of disadvantage. And the questionnaire datarevealed that, overall, teachers reported 28% of the pupils (310 in total) ashaving difficulties associated with language; of these, about threequarterswere of the ‘poor vocabulary’ or ‘poor self-expression’ type.In a subsequent investigation (Edwards, 1977b), speech samples wererecorded from 20 working-class and 20 middle-class Dublin boys (withequal numbers taken from primary and fifth-level classes). All thechildren were, on the information of their teachers, average students.Adult middle-class judges were then asked to evaluate the children’sintelligence, fluency, vocabulary, general voice quality (e.g. pronunciationand intonation) and communicative ability. On all measures, themore disadvantaged children were viewed less favorably than theirmiddle-class counterparts. In interpreting the results, I reasoned that thelower ratings received on fluency and communication might well reflect‘poorer’ performance, if the norms of the middle-class judges were takeninto account; for the other measures, however especially that of voicequality we are presumably seeing more subjective impressions. These,in turn, reflect what we can, by now, understand to be pervasive socialstereotypes that may have nothing to do with intrinsic voice elements.Since these sorts of findings have been widely replicated across a rangeof contexts, it is as well to consider what they suggest. They indicate thatteachers are, naturally enough, concerned about children’s speech andlanguage and since they are obviously not isolated from broader socialperspectives they tend to see the speech of disadvantaged children as