Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

166 Language Diversity in the ClassroomThe major results were as follows. First, on every scale, thedisadvantaged children received less favorable ratings than did themiddle-class children; the support for earlier work was clear. Factoranalysis of the ratings showed all of them to be highly interrelated, andonly one important factor emerged. We could recall here Williams’sconsistent finding of two important factors in teacher ratings: ‘confidence/eagerness’and ‘ethnicity/nonstandardness’. Since ethnicity wasnot a factor in the Irish context, it is therefore unsurprising that only onefactor (‘disadvantage-nondisadvantage’) emerged here. This result suggeststhe validity of the idea that teachers’ reactions derive from someoverall elicited stereotype of disadvantaged children. One would notwish to deny that other scales and other speech situations might evokeother factors; in the school context, however, judgments of disadvantagedchildren at least on scales relating to language and school ability may well be rather unidimensional.Turning to the ‘confidence’ scales, we see an analogous finding: nondisadvantagedchildren were judged with greater certainty than thedisadvantaged. An interesting difference, however, occurred between thetwo sorts of ratings, with regard to the gender of the judges. Maleteachers were found to give higher ratings on the substantive scales thanwere female judges; on the ‘confidence’ scales, however, the reverse wasthe case. Thus, it appeared that, overall, males made more positiveratings, but were less sure of them, while females were more confidentabout their somewhat less favorable substantive ratings. Apart fromindicating that one is not dealing, in rating scales generally, with a simpleresponse tendency for one gender to make higher or lower marks on ascale, there is an intriguing possibility here, and it is one that deservesfurther study (if only because scales remain so commonplace in socialpsychologicaland sociolinguistic research). Perhaps males tend to overcommitthemselves in their ratings, to make somewhat more polarizedjudgments and then take the opportunity provided by the confidencescales to ‘soften’ their judgments, as it were. Females, having been morecircumspect from the start, may not find this necessary.Considering the confidence ratings as they related to each individualsubstantive scale, it was found that some of the latter tended to be ratedwith greater certainty than others. Since I have just pointed out that allthe substantive scales were highly interrelated (in the factor analysis), itmight seem that, if some smaller subset were required, it would not makemuch difference which scales were chosen. However, the results of theconfidence judgments reveal that some scales have at least greater facevalidity than others. The generality here is this: judges were more