Language as Talisman: Accommodating Accents & Dialects Dr David Hyatt School of Education 17 th January2013

Context Where teachers had been criticized by Ofsted for not providing ‘good’ models of spoken English To help children understand, value and be confident of their own accents (and dialects) To give schools an authoritative voice to speak back to such critiques Demonstrating discourse attuning as a useful social practice

Standards!!!! Rebecca Wheeler and Rachel Swords contend that the correctionist approach to language response “diagnoses the child’s home speech as ‘poor English’ or ‘bad grammar,’ finding that the child who does not know how to show plurality, possession, and tense,’ …‘has problems’.” (Pathologising diversity) This approach assumes that “Standard English” is the only proper form of language and tries to do away with the child’s home language. Because classrooms are not culturally or linguistically monolithic, this approach tends to exclude those students who are not fluent in “Standard English.”

A common view?...our language has become so impoverished, so sloppy and so limited - that we have arrived at such a dismal wasteland of banality, cliché and casual obscenity. (Prince Charles 1997) We’ve allowed so many standards to slip. Teachers weren’t bothering to teach kids to spell and punctuate properly. If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English, where people turn up filthy at school. All those things cause people to have no standards at all and once you lose standards then there’s no imperative to stay out of crime. (Norman Tebbit 1985) The socio-historical, socio-political development of Standard English as the dominant dialect –’a class dialect’ Fairclough (1989) – no better, no worse than other dialects, just more powerful!!!

Everyday Spoken (‘Standard’) English (BNC) Fillers - I mean, like, y’know Omission of nouns/pronouns “ The band went…ran off in tears apparently. Couldn’t cope” Omission of verbs “Good drink, that” Hyperbole - “starving”, “brilliant”, “gorgeous” Politeness - “You wanna lift?” “Yeah” Post-positioning “Cos they get money out of the government don’t they….farmers”

An alternative??? The contrastivist approach is that “language comes in diverse varieties.” This “linguistically-informed model” recognizes that the student’s home language is not any more deficient in structure than the school language. In this approach, teachers “help children become explicitly aware of the grammatical differences” between the formal “Standard English” and the informal home language. “Knowing this, children learn to code-switch between the language of the home and the language of the school as appropriate to the time, place, audience, and communicative purpose.” When an educator prepares a student to code-switch, the student becomes explicitly aware of how to select the appropriate language to use in the given context.

Accommodation Theories Humans are social – we like to converge with those we like/ evaluate positively! Bourhis and Giles (1977) – the Welsh example! Discourse attuning (Coupland 2010) – regulating how interpretable our talk is for our audience: Overaccommodating: talking loudly to foreigners; talking loudly or using ‘secondary baby-talk’ to elderly people in residential care homes. Underaccommodating: younger adults/teens using topics that exclude older adults or laughing at their lack of understanding of neologism

Working with these ideas Look at the activity the children did and then watch them doing it! Two clips: – 7.57

Some potential strategies Recognize vernacular patterns in writing and use this to teach a whole class lesson on the differences between the “Standard English” version and home talk. Maybe use a chart to show the differences. Initiate conversations about how people speak differently in diverse settings - Explain how and when certain language usage is or is not appropriate. Make sure students understand how certain contexts require code-switching /discourse attuning and demonstrate this - the way we respond to a friend’s question might be completely different than how we would answer the headteacher or the inspector’s queries. Affirm for students that their language is viable and valuable. Engage students in a role-playing activity where they imitate different people they know within the community, and have students examine the differences in the way these people speak and why. Demonstrate how to self-correct written work for a formal purpose, and when students feel more comfortable, encourage them to read their work aloud. Introduce dialectical language through literature. Culturally rich literature is available at every grade level. Make sure students understand that you understand and value the historical importance of their modes of talk. Develop culturally reflective assignments and activities with a focus on diversity. (For example: assigning students to give a tribute speech on someone in their home community in the dialect or language in which the person would speak.)