Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Introduction 13‘mainstream’ or a willingness to see it evolve in the face of changingdemographic circumstance, with tolerance and prejudice in a word,with matters of individual and group identity.Educational and social disadvantage underpinned by (among otherthings) inaccurate linguistic opinion and prejudice remains a greatproblem. Popular speech and language attitudes continue to hold certaindialects and accents as better or worse than others. There is no realdifficulty, of course, in the possession of personal preferences, in the factthat I think Italian to be the most beautiful and mellifluous of languages,whereas you find the greatest music and poetry in Scottish Gaelic. Butthere are dangers when we imagine that we are arguing aboutsubstantive linguistic issues, about the inherent properties of one varietyor another, or worse still about the cognitive attributes thought toaccompany certain language forms. In all these ways, the so-called‘deficit’ theory of nonstandard dialects and, indeed, of certain foreignlanguages continues to hold wide sway. The man or woman on theClapham omnibus or the Bondi tram may not be able to articulate thistheory, may indeed be quite unaware that they have a theory, but it is theeasiest thing in the world to demonstrate the theory’s influence: just askpeople about ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ language (see Lippi-Green, 1997;Trudgill, 1975).To conclude and to reiterate: my hope is that, while this book is clearlynot a ‘how-to’ manual in any direct sense, it will prove a comprehensiveguide to important language issues for students, teachers and researchers.There are some parts of some discussions that are more tightlypresented than others, of course but none, I believe, is beyond the graspof any intelligent reader. The audience will no doubt be largely ananglophone one, and it is certainly true that I draw most of theinformation here from literature in English. However, since the fundamentalissues of concern extend well beyond the anglophone world, thetreatment has mutatis mutandis, as they say a broader scope.Among the large number of references to other work that I make inthis book, some may at first glance seem outdated. This is not so,however: the earlier publications I cite have been carefully chosen fortheir enduring value and salience. One of my chief contentions here isthat the essential issues in the area remain much as they were when theseseminal pieces of research first appeared. I have, of course, supplementedthem freely with more up-to-date work, but only when these laterundertakings have in fact added substantially to what has alreadyappeared. (Or, of course, when discussing matters that are, themselves,more recent: Ebonics, for example.) A more subtle point in all of this is