Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Disadvantage: A Brief Overview 43We are right to delete such inaccuracies as ‘sociocultural deprivation’and ‘genetic deficiency’, but it would be a shame if ‘disadvantage’ wasjettisoned too. We can discuss certain children as being at a disadvantagein society without casting the slightest aspersion upon their own culture,language, socialization and so on. Disadvantage signifies inequalitiesthat we know to exist, and to the extent to which one is excluded fromfull participation, one is disadvantaged. A related reason for theretention of the term ‘disadvantage’, as opposed to limp differencetheoryphrases (‘culturally different’, for instance), is that it can act as auseful counterbalance to the sometimes too sanguine outlook ofdifference theorists. That is, just as terming a child environmentallydeprived may invoke an unwarranted halo effect, so difference theoristshave sometimes been wont to see their subjects as neither needing norasking for outside help. Those who emphasize the strengths of ‘workingclassculture’ (and it certainly has some: recall Orwell’s (1937) observationthat ‘there is much in middle-class life that looks sickly anddebilitating when you see it from a working-class angle’), for example,ought to remember that there is no virtue in poverty itself, and that poorchildren who achieve at school do so despite, and not because of,material and other inadequacies. As Rutter and Madge (1977: 2) oncenoted, ‘behind the words... the human predicament is real enough’.Retention of the forthright ‘disadvantage’ might be salutary here.While there are a great many short- and long-term factors that mayprove disadvantageous to individuals in many areas of life, thepsychological, educational and linguistic disadvantage under discussionhere reflects relatively enduring group conditions. The characteristics andlifestyles of some communities the working class, immigrant populationsand ethnic minorities among them may lead to poor schoolachievement and generally dampened chances of success in the largersociety. The assumption is that the ‘cultures of poverty’, often marked byclass, or race or ethnicity, do little to prepare a child for the more middleclasscontexts and consequences of formal education. While initial schoolentry implies, for all children, a break from the only life they havehitherto known, children from certain groups may be at a relativedisadvantage because of a more sharply marked discontinuity betweenhome and school.Disadvantage is a sociocultural phenomenon, then, whose workingsdo not rest upon genetic intellectual disability; they emerge, rather,because of variations in patterns of early socialization. It arises at pointsof contact between groups that are at once distinguishable and yet part ofthe same larger society, which is why it is generally most immediately