Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Evaluative Reactions to the Language of Disadvantage 159differences between the two investigations, however, and the Piché studyinvolved black children: an important variation.)Evidence of the possible scope of the relationship between teacherratings and speech style was provided in the Hawaiian study by Choyand Dodd (1976) already noted (in Chapter 6). When asked to rateprimary-school children who spoke either standard or nonstandardvarieties of English, teachers consistently favored the former. Thesechildren were seen to be more confident, better at school, less ‘disruptive’in class and likely to achieve greater academic and social success. But theassessors were also willing to go well beyond school-related matters, tomake predictions about more general social capabilities: judgments ofhow happy the children’s marriages would likely be, for example. Auseful summary discussion of this expansive evaluation is that of Rossand Nisbett (1991). They note that the tendency to account for behaviorand its consequences in terms of internal traits of the ‘actor’ rather thanexternal or ‘situational’ factors (they call it a ‘dispositional’ tendency) isso strong that ‘people will make confident trait-based predictions on asmall evidence base’ (Ross & Nisbett, 1991: 124).Williams and his colleagues conducted an important series of studiesin the 1970s; collectively, these comprise one of the most comprehensiveand sustained investigations of disadvantaged speech in the Americancontext. The work builds from the familiar observation that manyevaluations rest upon stereotypes elicited by the speech samples presentedto judges. Whereas previous work had either focused upon the operationof the evaluation process per se (e.g. the Montreal studies of Lambert andhis colleagues) or on the isolation of the features or characteristics ofspeech most important in that process (e.g. the work by Labov, Trudgilland others on speech-status markers), Williams was concerned with both(see Williams, 1970a). In a study of black and white primary-schoolchildren, Williams (1970b) asked Chicago teachers (white or blackthemselves) to rate the pupils on a number of semantic-differential scales:the dimensions included fluency, complexity of sentences, reticence andpronunciation, but there were also scales that asked for judgments aboutfamily socioeconomic status, degree of disadvantage and standardnessor nonstandardness of speech. Factor analysis of the ratings suggestedtwo important themes. One of these, labelled ‘confidence/eagerness’,reflected children’s perceived confidence and social status. The other wasalso associated with social-status judgments, relating mainly to perceptionsof ethnicity and the nonstandardness or standardness of speech:unsurprisingly, it was labelled ‘ethnicity/nonstandardness’. The argument,then, is that teachers evaluated the speech samples (and the