Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

162 Language Diversity in the Classroomdimension to the cognitive one reflected in belief, and such an additionis needed for a fuller attitudinal evaluation. The point becomes clearer ifwe consider more broadly based investigations. In many languagestudies, for instance, it is common to elicit responses to questions like‘How important is a knowledge of French for you (your children, thiscommunity, etc.)?’ Clearly, one might feel that such knowledge wasextremely important while, at the same time, heartily disliking thelanguage, its speakers and the necessity to learn it (see also Goot, 1993,on the degree of ‘passion’ underpinning respondents’ ratings).If we concerned ourselves more directly with fully fleshed attitudes,rather than the beliefs commonly indicated by check-marks on scales,we might begin to find out more about the reasons behind judges’evaluations. Recent developments in ‘perceptual dialectology’ arerelevant here. The term, particularly associated with the work of Prestonand his associates, reflects a sort of marriage between the study of dialectvariation and ‘folk linguistics’ (i.e. popular language attitudes, beliefsand stereotypes), so as to tap into the subjective ‘real-world’ perceptionsthat are often at variance with scholarly insight, and usually much moreimportant. The data-collection methods used go well beyond structuredinterviews, questionnaires and the like: the intention is to allowrespondents to more fully contextualize their points of view (Preston,1989, 1999; see also Long & Preston, 2002; Niedzielski & Preston, 2000).For further comments on the desirability of broader evaluation exercises,see Edwards (1982), Palozzi (2006), and below.Beyond predicting differential reactions to dialect varieties, we canalso make predictions about those varieties produced by non-nativespeakers of English that show the influence of the first language. Weunderstand, at a general level, how these reactions come about, vialinguistic ‘triggering’, and how they reflect a set of stereotypical attitudes(or beliefs, at any rate) that listeners have of speakers. Investigators havenot, however, gone very much beyond fairly gross explanations; that is,they have typically not related speech evaluations to particular speechattributes. Thus, although hundreds of experiments have revealednegative reactions towards BEV (for example), we have very littleinformation relating specific linguistic attributes of that variety to suchreactions. These could plausibly include pronunciation patterns, particulargrammatical constructions, dialect-specific lexical items, or anycombination of these and other factors.In other words, the simultaneous consideration of both evaluation andthe cues triggering it advocated, and to some extent acted upon, byWilliams and his colleagues has not attracted a great deal of research