Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

164 Language Diversity in the Classroomexceptions: see, again, Laver and Trudgill [1979], as well as Graff et al.[1983].)We would benefit, therefore, from efforts to revive the doubleemphasis of Williams and his colleagues, perhaps to bridge more thework of psychology and linguistics. The effect would be to refine andparticularize our knowledge of how specific aspects of speech elicitspecific types of evaluative reactions. Recent useful forays in this directioncan be found in the collection edited by Milroy and Preston (1999). Ofcourse, even if we could isolate the most important speech cues, it isunclear what immediate use this would have. Attempting to alterspecific speech characteristics, for example, would be difficult in itselfand among speech communities of so-called ‘visible minorities’ probably of little ‘stand-alone’ benefit. On the other hand, a generalpolicy of addition to or expansion of a child’s linguistic repertoire couldrender such detailed information almost unnecessary. Nonetheless,arguments have been made from within the American black communitythat the acquisition of more standard features of English would at leastremove one potential stimulus to negative perception. As a blackeducator said on an instructional video, ‘At least they won’t be able tosay that you didn’t get that job ‘‘cause you speak poor English’’’ (seeAlvarez & Kolker, 1987).In another useful development, Williams (1974, 1976) discussed whathe termed the ‘latitude of attitude acceptance’. Not an entirely newconcept in the larger domain of social psychology, this is an acknowledgementthat raters’ evaluations may not be entirely adequatelyexpressed by making a single mark on some semantic-differential scale.Having particular regard to language-evaluation studies, Williamsargued that determining judges’ range of acceptance might be a usefuladdition to that single mark. Beyond making a rating choice in the usualway, judges could also indicate other generally acceptable ratingpossibilities; likewise, ratings that would definitely be rejected couldalso be revealed. An example might be:This child sounds: passive +:+ :+::–:–:–activeThe three ‘plus’ signs towards the ‘passive’ end of the scale here couldindicate ratings generally acceptable to a judge: his or her ‘latitude ofacceptance’. If one of these was circled or otherwise highlighted (I haveput it in bold here), that could be taken as the judge’s single bestestimate. A position left blank (as in the mid-position, above) coulddenote lack of decision or neutrality, with the three ‘minus’ signs