Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

160 Language Diversity in the Classroomchildren) along two broad dimensions; one of these appears to relate toethnicity and ethnic, nonstandard speech patterns, while the secondreflects relatively personal attributes of children themselves. As to thespecific speech cues eliciting the teachers’ reactions, Williams identified anumber of types: frequency of pausing, for example, was found to benegatively related to confidence ratings, and nonstandard grammaticalvariants (as found in BEV: see above) were associated with evaluationsalong the ethnicity/nonstandardness dimension.In an expanded study, Williams et al. (1972) probed the evaluationsmade of low- and middle-status black, white and Mexican-Americanchildren by teachers in Texas. They confirmed the previously establishedtwo-factor model of teachers’ judgments, and the findings that childrenof low socioeconomic status are considered more ‘ethnic/nonstandard’and are viewed less favorably on variables underpinning the ‘confidence/eagerness’dimension. Within the low-status category, whitechildren were seen more positively, and as less ‘ethnic/nonstandard’than were the black and Mexican-American pupils. Williams and hiscolleagues also found that the teachers’ evaluations of the actual childrenrepresenting each of the ethnic groups in the study correlated reasonablywell with their more general semantic-differential evaluations of thethree groups (when these were presented to them via simple writtenlabels). This led the authors to suggest that, in rating the individual child,teachers may be fulfilling their own, more general expectations. Theyalso note that black and white teachers’ perceptions were remarkablysimilar. This important finding suggests that speech evaluations easilygeneralize across ethnic and class boundaries, and may reflect whatmany have seen as the rapid internalization of ‘mainstream’ social valuesby members of relatively non-prestigious groups who move into thatmainstream wholly, partially or, indeed, in posse.Further Refinements in the Study of ‘Disadvantaged’LanguageSocial psychologists have generally investigated language perceptionsdirectly (by finding, for instance, appropriate representatives of each ofthe speech varieties to be investigated) or indirectly (the classic indirectapproach has been Lambert’s ‘matched-guise’ technique; see above). Inboth the direct and the indirect approaches, speech samples are often‘pre-tested’ by an appropriate group of judges, so as to ensure that theydo indeed reflect the proper group. These sorts of studies have produceda sizeable body of evidence bearing on social perceptions, stereotypes