Snell, J orcid.org/0000-0002-0337-7212 and Cushing, I (2022) “A lot of them write how they speak”: policy, pedagogy and the policing of ‘nonstandard’ English. Literacy, 56 (3). pp. 199-211. ISSN 1741-4350
Abstract
International studies of talk-intensive (or ‘dialogic’) pedagogies have demonstrated that children who experience academically challenging classroom discussion (‘dialogue’) make greater progress than their peers who have not had this experience. In England, gains in achievement have been greatest for pupils from less privileged socio-economic backgrounds, thus underlining the importance of dialogue to social mobility. However, policy prescriptions on ‘standard English’ run counter to the principles of dialogic teaching by privileging ‘correct’ forms of expression over emerging ideas. In this article, we argue that schools can be coerced by macro-level policy into creating meso-level policies which police nonstandardised forms in the classroom with the assumption that this will improve literacy rates. We draw upon a corpus of Ofsted reports as well as data collected in primary schools – pupil writing and focus groups, video-recorded literacy lessons and teacher interviews – to demonstrate that features of spoken dialect grammar occur infrequently in pupil writing, yet the narrative that spoken dialect is a ‘problem’ within education is driving policy/practice that is detrimental to classroom talk and pupil learning. We argue that this must be addressed urgently if we are to exploit the full potential of talk for learning and for addressing educational inequities.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. Literacy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of United Kingdom Literacy Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work isproperly cited. |
Keywords: | dialect; dialogue; spoken language; pupil writing; language ideologies; standard English |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Leverhulme Trust RF-2021-532 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 04 Aug 2022 09:09 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 23:04 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/lit.12298 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:189669 |