Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

280 Language Diversity in the Classroomunfavorably position some groups of people. We do such groups noservice by romanticizing their plight, or by suggesting that theirdisabilities are merely ‘different abilities’. To make such a case is toreveal a posture that cannot be sustained outside the academic cloisters,and it usually accompanies ideological perspectives having little realconnection to the lives of those who are apparently meant to be thebeneficiaries of attention. In fact, there are many disadvantaging featuresand characteristics that are non-randomly distributed across society, andsome have linguistic aspects.Mealy-mouthed neologisms and periodic relabellings do little service,either to scholarship or to those being described. But it would be an evengreater error to allow broad criticism here to undercut necessaryrefinements in our understanding of social disadvantage, linguisticand otherwise. In my opening chapters, then, I try to make it as clearas I can that disadvantage is real, but that it is neither the product ofinherent genetic deficiency nor the result of crippling environmentaldeficits. (Of course, these can obviously accompany and reinforce it.) Itis, rather, a phenomenon that can only occur in stratified societies, canonly emerge when social comparisons become possible. It reflects thejudgments of those in power upon those who are relatively powerless.As considered here, then, disadvantage is a social-psychological entity. Itcan thus be considered separately from the tangible or physicalconsequences of substantive genetic or environmental deficiencies.But this means, in effect, that social disadvantage can be even morereal, even more debilitating. This is because causes that are at onceintangible and pervasive can long outlast those that we can more clearlyidentify and, if necessary, combat. We have learned a great deal over theyears about the inaccuracy and the iniquity of most ‘genetic’ arguments,and intervention is always at least theoretically possible where environmentalproblems retard physical or mental growth. No, with socialdisadvantage, we are in the murky but potent realms of socialperception, and the great lesson here is that perception is reality. Whenwe think of social disadvantage, then, we can eliminate as I try to do inthe first few chapters actual, substantive deficiencies as the main fuel ofdisadvantage, logically arriving at the position that such disadvantagerepresents social difference. Languages and dialects of low prestigeoccupy that status because they are not spoken by those who have theability to assign terms like ‘standard’ and ‘nonstandard’. There is nothinginherently wrong with any of them, however one of the great truths ofmodern linguistics that should be much more widely disseminated andwe are right to utterly reject the term ‘substandard’.