Socio-Linguistics: English and Social Justice

Notes from The Preachers of Culture by Margaret Mathieson (1975)

Chapter 10 – Socio-Linguistics: English and Social Justice

This chapter presents the recent (from 1970s perspective) high value placed on children’s oral participation and its link with the sense of social justice and the relativism of modern linguistics. The teaching of “oracy” is presented as being akin to developing children’s personal development and social competence.

• Recent enthusiasm for encouragement of children’s classroom talk has origins in progressive theories (particularly value of child-directed learning), Cambridge School has opposed passivity by giving support to personal engagement.
• 1944 Education Act and move towards comprehensive schools have indicated interest in removing some of the inequalities in Britain’s social structure. It revealed that the great majority of working class children fail at school.
• 1963 Newsome Report acknowledged that children’s “retarded linguistic development” was responsible for educational failure.
• Quotes Newsome Report: “The evidence of research increasingly suggests that linguistic in­ adequacy, disadvantages in social and physical background, and the poor attainments in school, are closely associated. Because the forms of speech for all they ever require for daily use in their homes and the neighbourhoods in which they live are restricted, some boys and girls may never acquire the basic means of learning and their intellectual potential is therefore masked.”
• Newbolt Report had already said: “until a child has acquired a certain command of the native language, no other educational development is even possible”.
• Newbolt Reoprt had supported practices of persistent correction by teachers and children’s imitations of their teacher’s good pronunciation.
• Newsome Report places “heaviest stress” on classroom discussion. Mathieson: “It asks the teacher to seize every opportunity in lessons ‘to provide material for discussion—genuine discussion—not mere testing by teacher’s question and pupil’s answer’,5 and asks him to question, when he teaches, whether ‘it is all monologue, or a reasonably balanced dialogue in which the pupils get a fair chance; is he in­ terested in what they have to say?’ What the Newsome Report is advocating derives principally from developments in educational theory which support children’s activity and the reduction of teachers’ authority in the classroom.”
• In 20th Century linguists have asserted the primacy of speech – though have rejected making qualitative judgements about human communication.
• Professor Wyld expressed linguists disproval of prescriptive grammar teaching to Newbolt Committee in 1921.
• Disapproval of prescriptive grammar teaching and insistence on greater pupil participation in:
  • Education (1966)
  • Talking and Writing (1967)
  • Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching (1968)
  • Language, the Learner and the School (1969)
  • Lost for Words (1972)
• Peter Doughty in Exploring Language: “A study of teachers’ attitudes in primary schools has shown that the child’s ability to use the linguistic table-manners his teacher expects is a key element in determining not only the teacher’s attitude to the child, but his assessment of his potential as a learner…Much common-room demand for a “clear, concise and intelligent English” is an expression of the wish that students’ experience of language should coincide with that of the teachers’…. The linguistic table-manners that are thought to reveal the presence of this uni­versally applicable “plain English” define and delimit the social group who are thought best suited to the staffing of the key institutions in our society, the Law, the Civil Service, Education, Company Administration, and so on.”
• Linguists anxious to attack ignorance and prejudice in teachers as a preliminary to promoting pupil talk.
• Domination of teacher talk in the classroom.
• Matheson: “Recent work in socio-linguistics suggests that the traditional school situation has been extremely unhelpful in promoting working-class children’s ‘personal development and social competence’. Their lack of access to the elaborated code because of the unavailability of social situations which demand it in working-class life appears to explain, in some measure, many working-class children’s failure to manipulate the language of the school. The schools’ almost exclusive concentra­tion upon the ‘representational’ model of language, in spite of its irrelevance to the majority of their pupils, has had the effect of making this majority appear unresponsive and unpromising. In addition, the combination of teachers’ social prejudices and their domination of most lessons, relieved only by questions demanding pre­ conceived answers has, it is argued, hindered working-class children’s academic progress.”
• Andrew Wilkinson created term “oracy” – protested against pupil passivity in schools.
• Since early 1920s formal teaching of grammar has been challenged – but teaching has persisted (as a “safeguard”)
• M.A.K. Halliday critical of teachers’ ignorance of linguistics and of the ways that it can make English classrooms more profitable (also says that university study of Literature not related to teaching English in schools).
• Supporters or oral work justify it partly on the grounds it provides experience and confidence that might make the literary use of language more comprehensible.
• Quotes Halliday: “if the English teacher does not teach the non-literary uses of English, there is no one else to do so. … Moreover, the pupil is more likely to appreciate English literature if he can also understand and get the most out of English in its non-literary uses. Literature is only literature against the background of the language as a whole.”
• Like progressives, linguists proposed increased encouragement of the personal.
• Halliday suggests that separating written and spoken language in children’s work puts a brake on self-expression and creates lifeless essays.
• Doughty argues that the majority of English teachers work on the assumption that pupils reading great literature, it will “rub off” on them and enable them to write the “best English”.
• Denis Lawton pointed out the cultural problem of working class children’s academic failure is “essentially a question of range within a language, that is, that restriction in the control over a language involves a restricted view of the universe, a restricted mode of thinking, a restricted ability to benefit from educational processes.”
• Mathieson (explaining): “Since language learning is closely associated with role playing, working-class children need opportunities, in school, to practise a wide variety of roles which make specific linguistic demands upon them. Since working-class boys, research evidence reveals, produced the elaborated code inside a structured discussion, it is proposed that pupils from working-class backgrounds be given abundant opportunities for similar experiences.”
• Halliday suggests that “prescriptive” language teaching is replaced by “descriptive” and “productive” language teaching.
• Quotes Halliday: “Descriptive language teaching aims to show the pupil how English works; this includes making him aware of his own use of English. Productive language teaching is concerned to help him—to extend the use of his native language in the most effective way. Unlike prescrip­tive teaching, productive teaching is designed not to alter patterns he has already acquired but to add to his resources; and to do so in such a way that he has the greatest possible range of the potentialities of his language available to him for appropriate use, in all the varied situations in which he needs them.”
• Mathieson discusses Language in Use (its 110 units etc.) which has two aims: children extend their repertoire of language codes through the schools’ provision of opportunities to adopt a variety of roles (improvisations and sketches are suggested); and that they develop ‘awareness’ of the nature and function of language. Replaces “correctness” with “appropriateness” of language use (within context of social justice).
• Quotes James Britton – Language and Learning (1970): “I see the beginning of school… not as the closing in of the workaday, but as the development of difference in language usage, a continua­tion and refinement, on the one hand, of language in the role of spectator, preserving the delight in utterance, providing for the contemplation of things in all their concrete particularity; and on the other hand the development by gradual evolution of language in the role of participant—language to get things done, the language of recipes and orders to the poultry-monger and of other more intel­lectual transactions.”
• Quotes Denis Lawton: “in all cases the important factor should be that teachers should never give the impression to a working-class child that his culture in general, or his form of speech in particular is in any way inferior to the culture of the school. The concept of appro­priateness rather than right or wrong speech and behaviour should become the desired end.”
• Proposals insist on the reduction of the teacher’s traditional authoritarian role. Non-standard English should be accepted in the classroom to enable pupils to learn “code-switching”.
• Harold Rosen – Language, the Learner and the School – suggests that innovations in the curriculum have focused interest on children’s use of language.
• Neil Postman – Teaching as a Subversive Activity.
• Peter Doughty and Geoffrey Thornton see society in continual change, express hopes in society’s movement towards reintegration of thought and feeling and fuse new approaches to language teaching with the teaching methods of interdisciplinary.
• The Humanities Project. Concerned with an appropriate curriculum for average and below-average pupils. Projects goals: “encourage tolerance and the ability to think humbly” and “assist the development of a capacity to make value judgements which are based on more than prejudice”. Teacher has role of “neutral chairman”.
• Tone of social justice set by Newsome Report.
• Quotes Newsome Report: “The overriding aim of English teaching must be the personal development and social competence of the pupil. And of all the different aspects of English, speech has by far the most significant contribution to make towards that development.”
• Quotes Halliday: “In the develop­ment of the child as a social being, language has the central role.”
• Linguists urged to think of themselves as “missionaries in a new way” – “missionaries trying to forge in the school where they serve a language environment which makes sense”.
• Places burden of responsibility on teachers:
  • James Britton’s use of “sense” – providing children with an education that will enable them to cope with the shock of future changing society.
  • Harold Rosen places emphasis on role of language acquisition. (“language for living”).
• Linguists’ recommendations made in tones reminiscent of the early progressives.
• Mathieson: “in common with supporters of literature and Creativity, demand exceptional qualities in the teachers. In order to stimulate discussion in an informal, relaxed atmosphere, they must inspire trust; to create confidence in children about the value of their oral responses, they must be open-minded. They must, moreover, if their interest is to be genuine, get to know the life of the school’s neighbour­hood.”
• Mathieson: “The argument of this book is that in response to changes in society and changes in educational theory, English has grown to dominate the secondary school curriculum. It has risen in status, grown bewilderingly diffuse and taken on a powerful sense of moral purpose. The dis­ crediting of formal grammar teaching, part of the complex process which moved the experience of literature, and creativity, to the centre of school English, has meant that English language has been regarded with suspicion by imaginative and forward-looking teachers this century. Within the past ten years, however, as a result of widespread acceptance of research findings in psychology and sociology about language acquisition and its role in educational failure, new approaches have been proposed which, aiming to remedy social injustice, have added another dimension to an already powerful ideology. Today, language teaching as defined by the Language in Use team, far from being the despised mechanical routine against which progressive English teachers reacted with literature and creative writing, is proposed as the work of greatest relevance to the majority of our pupils. Whether viewed as an activity to be pursued in addition to these or to replace them, its supporters insist upon the value of its acceptance with a sense of purpose as strong as any other discussed in this book.”