Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Introduction 11attitudes and stereotypes, to merge linguistic and psychological insights.The second is quite broad in scope, with reports from Britain, the UnitedStates and the Nordic countries. The third focuses on Wales, but itsopening chapters deal with language attitudes in a general way; it isinteresting to see just how many of the references cited there, are of the1970s vintage (see below). Ladegaard’s continuing series of studies inDenmark (Ladegaard, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 2000; see also Ladegaard &Sachdev, 2006) is also important.Similarly, the new or renewed emphasis upon ‘folk linguistics’ and‘perceptual dialectology’, which often represents a desire to get to gripswith more fully fleshed language attitudes, is a vital modern subdiscipline;see the overviews provided by Preston (1999) and Long andPreston (2002). Finally here, I note that Rampton’s (2006) ethnographictreatment of classroom discourse acknowledges that, while the attitudinalatmosphere at school with respect to the tolerance and treatment ofdialect variation is not the same as it was in the 1960s and 1970s,perceptions of social class, its linguistic reflections and the attendantpsychological stresses remain important. Writing of two pupils, Ramptonnotes thatboth Hanif and Ninnette had fairly clear images of the kinds ofdisadvantaged lives they wanted to avoid... working-class pupilsmight not be quite as fragile as sociolinguistics has sometimesimplied, but everyday experience and a huge non-linguistic literatureon class provides [sic] ample reason for taking class-related insecuritiesvery seriously. (Rampton, 2006: 320)Sensitive attention to the details of discourse and conversation can ofcourse reveal many things of interest. Studies of gender differences in theclassroom are a good case in point here, one in which a close analysis ofverbal exchanges can be of the greatest value: variations in the questionand-answerpatterns of girls and boys, for instance, or of differentialattention provided by teachers (see Carr & Pauwels, 2006; Julé, 1984;Sommers, 2000). But even its most fervent advocates admit that, in manycases, discourse studies do not reveal much that is new (Stubbs, 1984)and the level of detail in which they often revel is unlikely to lead toameliorative action. This is an important matter, important enough tojustify fuller attention in the next chapter.The broader message, to this point, is that I have tried to assemble herea useful and comprehensive combination of older work (some of it datingto the 1960s and 1970s: a time when, for instance, a great deal of attentionwas being given to describing and categorizing dialect variation) and the