Language Diversity in the Classroom

John Edwards

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781847693822
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides comprehensive coverage of language contact in classroom settings. A thorough analysis of the sources and implications of social "disadvantage" is presented first, since the nonstandard dialects that children bring with them to school – and the unfavourable perceptions of these dialects – have traditionally given rise to educational difficulties. The persistence of these perceptions is particularly highlighted. More general issues surrounding the range and implications of language attitudes are dealt with, as is the important "test case" of Black English. The book also discusses foreign-language teaching and learning, as well as the assumptions and intentions underpinning bilingual and multicultural education. Given its breadth and its style, this book should be of interest and value to all teachers, as well as to students and researchers concerned with any aspect of the social life of language.

Chapter 1

Introduction

L'école est un curieux lieu de langage. Il s'y mélange les langues officielle, privée, scolaire, des langues maternelles, des langues étrangères, de l'argot de lycéen, de l'argot de la cité. À considérer toutes ces langues qui cohabitent, je me dis que l'école est peut-être le seul lieu où elles peuvent se retrouver dans leur diversité et dans leurs chevauchements. Mais il faut être très vigilants et justement tirer partie de cette belle hétérogénéité. (Steiner & Ladjali, 2003: 83–84)

A Brief Rationale

Among my other academic activities and duties, I have been giving talks to teachers and teachers' organizations since the early 1970s. These have typically dealt with the points of intersection among education, social class, ethnolinguistic status and group identity. Such topics, with all their many ramifications, have always been of great interest to teachers, since they are so obviously relevant to the daily life of an ever-increasing number of classrooms. Whether it is a matter of accepting or rejecting nonstandard dialects or foreign languages at school, of adapting classrooms to language diversity or attempting to maintain a strict monolingual regimen, of seeing school as a contributor to social change or as a supporter of some 'mainstream' status quo, of arguing the merits of 'transitional' versus 'maintenance' programs of bilingual education, of embracing multiculturalism or recoiling from it — in all these matters, the knowledge, sensitivities and attitudes of teachers are of no small importance.

And yet, over three decades or so, I have been amazed and disappointed at how ill-prepared teachers typically are with regard to linguistic and cultural variation in the classroom. The education of teachers generally involves very little exposure to this sort of heterogeneity, and yet it is easy to see that it has made its presence felt in virtually every global setting. Even schools in 'traditional' and rural areas whose populations were historically both local and stable are now more and more confronted with children from many different backgrounds. The geographical spread of Spanish speakers throughout the USA — far beyond the initially adopted settlement areas of Florida and the southwest — is a case in point, as is the widening distribution and permanence of the European 'guest workers', as is the exploding mobility that has now brought hundreds of thousands of east Europeans, as well as African and Asian refugees, to countries in western Europe; and so on. I have also discovered that many jurisdictions have essentially denied a diversity that was always there, a reflection of a sort of socially imposed ignorance. Thus, for example, when I began research work in Nova Scotia, it was immediately clear that prevailing perspectives made little room for longstanding groups of low social status. In some schools, there were sizeable groups of African-Canadian youngsters, descendants of those who came to Canada during the American Civil War, along the 'underground railroad', or who had been given land grants in return for service in the British army; in others, there were Acadian children of French-speaking background. An inability or an unwillingness to see such groups as anything other than very minor aberrations in an essentially English/Celtic mainstream had the predictable consequences.

Even if there was no great likelihood of teachers encountering social or linguistic diversity in their classrooms (increasingly implausible as this would seem), I think that a good case could still be made for giving much more attention to such diversity. In this book, I will argue that all good education worthy of the name is multicultural and, if this is so, a logical implication is that any heightening of teachers' cross-cultural and cross-subcultural sensitivities must be a good thing.

Finally here, it is important to note that expanded sensibilities are not at all difficult to bring about. The matters under discussion in this book are not rocket science. To take one example: the evidence that Black English dialects are just as valid as any other English variants, that they are just as rule-governed, that their patterns of pronunciation and emphasis are just as regular, that they serve the cognitive needs of their speakers just as well as any other form of speech does — all this and more can be presented to, and understood by, anyone who has an open mind. I know, because I have made presentations to teachers and teachers-in-training, as well as to hundreds of senior students in language seminars. So much the worse, then, that so many are still left to labor under stereotyped, inaccurate and potentially harmful illusions. As I shall shortly point out, poor and socially disadvantaged children have very real burdens to bear; it is an unnecessary further tragedy that their linguistic and cognitive skills should be misunderstood or denigrated. The consequences, in terms of impediments to learning, early curtailment of formal education and reduced chances in the world beyond the school gates can be enormous.

Sympathetic Voices

There have been several contemporary calls for the sort of attention I hope to highlight in this book, as well as earlier ones demonstrating the longstanding nature of the issue. There has, for instance, been a number of recent works arguing for greater and more precise attention to the teaching of foreign languages, and almost all these works stress the importance of the ideological framework within which this occurs. Unlike earlier and more linguistically focused treatments, these later ones encourage a broader sociolinguistic and sociocultural contextualization (e.g. Osborn, 2000; Reagan & Osborn, 2002). Their very existence, of course, testifies to a continuing need. In the American context, the need is particularly evident where Hispanic children are concerned: Flores (2005) presents a rather chilling chronological table in which the assessments of the 1920s — a time when Spanish speakers were sometimes judged to be mentally retarded — have now become condemnations of bilingual education programs that prevent the most efficient acquisition of English. (Flores' table can be interestingly set against another, provided by Baker [2006], which charts the rise and fall of language programs in the USA.) A recent small-scale example demonstrates the continuing tendency for alleged language deficiencies to be taken as evidence of underlying cognitive weakness (Commins & Miramontes, 1989). In another setting, Hélot and Young (2005: 242–244) show that, since the French educational system is still largely 'envisaged from a monolingual point of view... it is difficult for most teachers to view the different languages and cultural backgrounds of their pupils as other than problematic'. The authors suggest that, where linguistic diversity does seem to be mildly encouraged by the education ministry, this is 'mainly as a policy to counterbalance the hegemony of English'. This alerts us to the possibility that, in some contexts, concerns for 'small' languages and cultures are more apparent than real, often masking other agendas.

Work by McDiarmid (1992) and McDiarmid and Price (1990) reveals that multicultural training programs in America seem either to make little impact on teachers-to-be or, worse, they actually reinforce minority-group stereotyping. Drawing upon this, Deering (1997: 343) argues for more, and more effective, ways to encourage teachers' multicultural sensitivity towards other cultures, particularly among American teacher populations that he found to be less culturally sensitive than their UK counterpart; see also Noguera (1996) on insufficient teacher preparation for culturally heterogeneous classrooms. Several aspects of Deering's brief report are less than completely satisfactory, however, and Burton-wood and Bruce (1999) cast some doubt upon the allegedly greater UK sensitivity. Nevertheless, they concur with the general observations about the need for improvement. They also remind us that the Swann Report (1985), which had made an argument for just such improvement, was effectively overtaken by British educational reform legislation three years later, reform that stressed the importance of a national curriculum (and thus, in the eyes of many observers, made less room for diversity in the classroom).

Later work has confirmed some of the difficulties here. Zientek (2007) has written about the general shortcomings of teacher-preparation programs in America; more specifically, she discusses the inadequate information provided about cultural and linguistic diversity in the classroom. Some of the current diversity here involves, of course, black, Hispanic and Asian American pupils, and Tenenbaum and Ruck (2007) have demonstrated the varied expectations that teachers have of children in these groups: Asian pupils were expected to do best at school, followed by 'European American' children, then Hispanics and, finally, black children. Teachers were also found to be more encouraging in their interactions with those of whom they expected the most. The dangers of such stereotypic preconceptions are obvious, contributing as they easily can to self-fulfilling prophecies; see also Wiggan (2007).

There is even evidence that the more specific training of teachers for bilingual education programs has been less than adequate. Grinberg and Saavedra (2000) cite some representative comments that demonstrate how university courses leading to teacher certification are often of 'little relevance'. One trainee notes: 'In my preparation as a bilingual educator I was not prepared for the reality in the school' (Grinberg & Saavedra, 2000: 433). Another observation:

Living here in the heart of New Mexico, we have very fertile grounds to develop strong, effective bilingual programs... [but] the university does not have a good program to prepare teachers... there is no rigor... the content of the classes is minimal, at a low level. (Grinberg & Saavedra, 2000: 434)

Grinberg and Saavedra discuss the emphasis upon language per se in training courses, and the lack of time devoted to cross-cultural education more broadly. The dissatisfaction noted by the first trainee teacher (above) is a particular problem: on the one hand, there is insufficient exposure to multicultural themes; on the other, the training that does exist under this heading is often inadequate. This may account for the reports of Martin (1995) and Zeichner (1994), who found that when teachers-to-be appeared uninterested in, or resistant to, multicultural training courses, their teachers characterized them as ill-prepared or, less charitably, as unrepentant possessors of racist and stereotyped views. It is not difficult to detect potential vicious circles here (see also McAllister & Irvine, 2000).

When discussing the 'culture' of the foreign-language classroom, the best of the recent books and papers give some attention to the language-dialect distinction and, more particularly, to the appropriate understanding of the validity of nonstandard dialect varieties. Siegel (2007: 76) provides a good example with a discussion showing just how little ground has been gained in this area. Describing creoles and nonstandard dialects in education, he points out that, despite several decades of sociolinguistic insight, accurate depictions of such varieties 'have not filtered down to many educators and administrators, or to the general public'; see also Zéphir (1997, 1999), who draws explicit parallels between the educational reception of creole and that of Black English. Such treatments touch upon the most important category here.

At 20-year intervals, the American Dialect Society (1943, 1964 and 1984; and Preston, 2003) published four works outlining 'needed research' in dialect studies. In the latest of these, several authors write about the important linguistic demonstrations of the validity of Black English and other nonstandard dialects, and about the useful developments in language-attitude research, 'perceptual dialectology' and 'folk linguistics' (see later chapters). They also acknowledge, however, that unenlightened stereotypes continue their baleful course. There is clearly much more to do, particularly in educational settings. In 1979, the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington issued five booklets devoted to 'dialects and educational equity'; these were revised and updated in one short volume by Wolfram and Christian (1989). In a question-and-answer format, the authors deal with issues raised by teachers in workshops, in-service sessions and other similar venues; although there are obvious limitations and discontinuities in such an approach, most of the important matters are at least touched upon. Wolfram and Christian note that, while researchers and those who teach teachers agree on the importance of information about dialect variation in the classroom, they have been hindered by the lack of appropriate texts.

It is interesting, to say the least, that over the 20 years following Labov's (1969) classic demonstration of the 'logic of nonstandard English' — in an America where Black English was achieving a new visibility — no suitable teacher-training material was apparently developed. Cochran-Smith (1995: 493) was blunt, describing the American educational system as 'dysfunctional for large numbers of children who are not part of the racial and language mainstream'. She argues, as Stone (1981), Sleeter and Grant (1987) and others have done, that multicultural 'education' has often been trivialized by attention to 'foods, folkways and handiwork'. There are no broad strategies, Cochran-Smith asserts, for dealing with cultural and linguistic diversity at school. Virtually all those who have written in scholarly ways about Black English have, of course, argued for the greater sensitivity to black culture and lifestyles that should logically accompany demonstrations of the validity of black dialects; the work of Smitherman (e.g. 1981a, 2006) is noteworthy here (and see also my discussion of Ebonics, below). Thus, in a review of a book on Black English, Kautzsch (2006) points to the necessity for more open-minded and well-informed teachers, and for educational systems committed to 'difference' rather than 'deficit' stances on cultural and dialect variations. And Godley et al. (2007: 124) provide a very recent classroom demonstration of the continuing assessments that equate 'standard' with 'correct', and Black English with 'incorrect, ungrammatical English'. A collection by Nero (2006) is also concerned with nonstandard varieties in the classroom; in his foreword, Elbow points to the pivotal issue of reconciling an acknowledgement of the validity of all varieties with the effective teaching of more standard ones.

Overall, the monograph-length treatment most similar to mine here is that of Corson (2001). His title is similar, and so are the areas he focuses upon: standard and nonstandard dialects, language education in its several formats, and discourse 'norms' in relation to cultural and gender variation. In this book, I stress ramifications of the first two, and pay less attention to matters of gender and discourse (for reasons that will be made clear). And, like me, Corson aims at a comprehensive overview of those aspects of linguistic diversity most relevant in education. However, while his notes about the intended audience reveal a basic concern with advanced social-science students and 'experienced teachers', and while I hope and expect that this book will be of interest in those quarters too, my central focus is upon teachers-to-be, those who train them, and researchers in the area. That is, the material between these covers is meant primarily to contribute to the lessening of misinformation and stereotype, and to the breaking of the unfortunate circles that they maintain. There is ample evidence that the inaccurate language attitudes often held by beginning teachers — who are, after all, members of societies in which stereotypes abound — are reinforced in a school culture that, like the larger community outside its gates, has traditionally encouraged ('privileged' would be the word many use nowadays) what is 'standard'. These attitudes, it has been suggested, are often strong enough that new teachers will 'hear' minority-group children's speech as nonstandard even if, in fact, it is not. Finally here, to make matters a little more poignant, there is some evidence to suggest that some younger teachers are initially more inclined to believe the 'different-but-not-deficient' argument about nonstandard varieties: how sad, then, if that encouraging initial insight becomes overwhelmed by the existing culture of the school (see Corson, 2001; Edwards, 1986; Fasold, 1984; see also the fleshing-out of these matters in the chapters following).

Brouwer and Korthagen (2005) have discussed aspects of this in a lengthy review. They note, at the outset, that 'occupational socialization in schools is a known factor counteracting attempts at educating innovative teachers' (Brouwer & Korthagen, 2005: 153). This is one pole of the problem, as it were: teachers, like the rest of us, are very susceptible to the cognitive and emotional tone of their surroundings. It is not to be doubted that such susceptibility is correlated with vagueness or ignorance, so that the issues on which one is least informed are likely to be those most prone to influence. A corollary is that attempts to replace ignorance with awareness are likely to act as inoculations against later susceptibility. To make this more specific: providing new teachers with accurate linguistic information about the competence of their pupils may disrupt a chain of ignorance and misinformation that is otherwise likely to continue. This brings me to the second pole. As Brouwer and Korthagen (2005: 153) observe, some studies have shown that the 'effects of teacher education on the actual practices of teachers are generally meager'. The implication here, then, is that the provision of linguistic and psychological information must be done well in order to have any chance of becoming that 'inoculation'. Fortunately, as I have already noted, it is not especially difficult to present the relevant findings in a digestible manner. Fortunate, but again a little sad, inasmuch as so much more could have easily been accomplished already.

Corson draws attention to the need for improved teacher sensitivity and to the benefits of having more ethnic-group members as teachers; above all, however, he echoes one of my opening concerns here (or, more accurately, one aspect of a broader concern). He remarks that 'classroom-related work on non-standard varieties is still in its infancy' (Corson, 2001: 79). In fact, this is a little inaccurate: as the list of references in this book demonstrates, there is no shortage of relevant research, much of it deriving from, and meant to feed back into, the educational system. It is the lack of appropriate synthesis, and then of application ? in teacher-training programs, for instance — that is the crux of the matter. This makes the second of Corson's broad observations rather more apposite: 'formal educational policies for the treatment of non-standard varieties in schools are conspicuous by their absence in most educational systems' (Corson, 2001: 68).

Like Corson before them, Quiocho and Rios (2000) consider the impact upon minority-group children of having teachers from their own group. They are undoubtedly correct in pointing out that there are fewer such teachers in America, the UK and elsewhere than we would like (see also Burtonwood & Bruce, 1999). They may also be right when they say that teachers who are from minority groups will be more likely to demonstrate multicultural sensitivity in the classroom. But it is important to point out that minority-group members who become teachers may, by that fact alone, be atypical of the group. Relatedly, the process of teacher training may tend to accelerate their middle-class socialization. (From a rather more polemical perspective, Grinberg and Saavedra [2000: 436] note that once Latinos and other minority-group members 'enter the system, internal processes of colonization take over'.) It is by no means clear, then, that increasing the number of teachers from particular sociocultural groups will lead to a commensurate increase in multicultural sensitivities in the classroom. And there is one fact here that never seems to be mentioned at all. When Quiocho, Rios and many other like-minded scholars call for educators and institutions to encourage more minority-group students to take up the profession of teaching, they may be encouraging a sort of self-imposed restriction that does not apply to 'mainstream' individuals. Over the years, I have had a number of Canadian native students in my university seminars, many of whom told me that they intended to become teachers. As I came to know them a little better, it was apparent that — as the (educated) minority within a socioeconomically depressed minority — they felt a duty to 'give back' to their community. Such altruistic motives are, of course, highly commendable, but I came to realize that at least some of my students were charting their career course out of a sense of obligation, rather than on the basis of personal preference. And it struck me that this was, in some sense, yet another burden that they carried, yet another limitation that their white counterparts rarely had to consider at all.

This Book

This book is an attempt to bring under one roof some important matters — largely linguistic but also, inevitably, sociocultural — that, I believe, should have greater exposure. It is not any sort of handbook or 'how-to' manual. It does not outline specific activities or curriculum adaptations, and its coverage is not restricted to what might be seen as immediately relevant in the classroom. It deals, rather, with background information that could reasonably inform pedagogical activities and research. In short, this book does not tell teachers what to do in class, but it may provide some useful underpinnings. As implied above, good contextualization is central to the enhancement of cultural and linguistic sensitivities, but there is also a case to be made for some linguistic and sociolinguistic basics, as noted by Brumfit (2001). Some of these obviously relate to 'foreign' languages, and some to nonstandard dialects. And, as Ferguson (2006: 174) reminds us, there ...