Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

76 Language Diversity in the Classroomthe Broadcast Standards Council, as well as from other interested parties.But Mailloux remained unrepentant: ‘de son côté, [il] ne regrette rien despropos qu’il a tenus en entrevue et a répété toute la journée qu’iln’accepte pas que la susceptibilité empéche de parler d’études scientifiques’.One thing, at least, seems clear, in this alarming and apparentlyunending cycle: we must not allow hate speech to slip into publicdiscourse under the banner of scientific investigation.Notes1. Buss (1976) makes the argument that, in addition to being the father ofeugenics, Francis Galton also launched the study of ‘individual differences’,or ‘differential psychology’. His 1883 publication, for example, gave someconsiderable attention to gender differences. While ever the courteousVictorian gentleman, Galton was like many other men of the time rathertaken aback by feminist developments. He felt that women had weakerintellects and powers of discrimination, going on to write that:coyness and caprice have in consequence become a heritage of the sex,together with a cohort of allied weaknesses and petty deceits, that menhave come to think venial and even amiable in women, but which theywould not tolerate among themselves. (Galton, 1883: 39)Among many other things, Galton was a committee member of an antisuffragesociety.2. An earlier example this time involving indigenous Americans is found inStetson’s (1897) study of the intelligence of black and white schoolchildren inWashington. His finding that the former outperformed the latter, on the basisof their comprehension and recall of poetry, was unpalatable and unacceptableto him and to others. Revisions of the procedure were immediatelysuggested. Wiggan (2007) comments on the matter (although his citation forStetson’s paper is inaccurate).It is not my purpose here to further discuss the art and science of testingin general, but I should alert the reader to the existence of an importantcontemporary literature on language testing in particular. The recent books bySpolsky (1995), Shohamy (2001) and McNamara and Roever (2006) arerecommended here because their critical overviews are grounded in theappropriate historical and social context.