Thread by @SnellJulia

New research by me and @ian_cushing published in Literacy (@The_UKLA), available open access here (tinyurl.com/mseavkvj) and a short thread on the work below. Thanks to @LeverhulmeTrust @LeedsUniEnglish and @LeedsUniAHC for funding support

Research has highlighted that the kind of talk pupils encounter in the classroom has implications for their learning and cognitive development, with dialogic talk shown to have particular benefits for those from low-income backgrounds.

But, genuine dialogic talk is still relatively rare - especially given a cluster of government policies which reproduce ideologies of linguistic correctness and encourage teachers to police language deemed to be in non-standard English.

And, we know that children from marginalised backgrounds are much more likely to have their language policed and labelled as deficient, which has severe consequences for their motivation to engage further in classroom interaction.

Furthermore, it is common for teachers to ‘correct’ pupils’ speech with the belief that (a) this will lead to 'improvements' in writing, and (b) to ensure that non-standardised forms do not transfer from speech to writing.

But how much do non-standardised spoken forms actually appear in writing, and what are teachers' perceptions about this relationship? We set out to answer this, looking at a corpus of children's writing, teacher/student interviews, classroom talk, Ofsted reports, and govt policy.

Ofsted often conflate speech and writing in their inspections, drawing ideological relationships between the quality of speech and the quality of writing, such as the idea that 'good speech' is characterised by 'full sentences' and 'bad writing' includes non-standard grammar.

Interviews with primary teachers also reproduced some of these ideologies, reporting that pupils’ spoken language has a (negative) impact on their writing, and that nonstandardised forms in speech are particularly symptomatic of this.

For example, one teacher told us that "if we don’t correct spoken forms then it does reflect into their writing, and they do end up writing it incorrectly", whilst another said "a lot of them write how they speak". These perceptions were used to justify the policing of speech.

Data from our pupil focus groups reciprocated this, where pupils talked about teachers who had instigated a ban on words which were symbolic of spontaneous speech, such as ‘like’ and ‘basically’. This follows various news stories about schools who have designed similar policies.

However, we want to emphasise that whilst dramatic 'dialect bans' are indeed problematic, this isn't the default mode of language policing, which happens much more covertly in the form of policies and pedagogies underpinned by ideologies of linguistic deficit and impoverishment.

Indeed, teachers we interviewed often justified language policing in reference to top-down pressures such as Ofsted, the Teachers' Standards and the curriculum - all of which represent policies underpinned by standard language ideologies of correctness, rules and appropriateness.

Our argument is certainly not to locate faults within individual teachers, but to consider the kinds of policy pressures that teachers are placed under which can have the potential to coerce them into reproducing prohibitive language ideologies in their own practice.

So, both policy and teachers we interviewed suggest that writing is peppered with non-standard grammar. But is this actually the case? To answer this, we built a corpus of Year 5/6 pupil writing of ~145,000 words from two schools, and coded this for any non-standard features...

Our results found that non-standard grammar really doesn't appear that much in writing. For example, whilst teachers and policy perceived non-standard 'was' to be a common 'error' in writing, this appeared less than 1 per 1000 words in our data.

Nonstandardised 'was' is particularly interesting because it has long been vilified in government-designed policy, framed as a 'problem' by teachers and a feature which regularly gets policed in spoken classroom interaction, as our video recordings of literacy lessons showed.

So: attempts to correct pupils’ speech get justified on the grounds that non-standard 'errors' transfer to writing, but this rarely actually happens. Instead, oral language policing simply closes down interactions and sends the message that marginalised speakers are deficient.

Spoken dialect grammar is not a major issue in relation to developing children’s writing. Yet the narrative that spoken dialect is a ‘problem’ is driving educational policy/practice that is ultimately detrimental to classroom talk and pupil learning.

In a global education policy context which claims to be 'evidence-led', we challenge policy makers to take seriously the work of educational linguists and to consider how dangerous, uninformed ideologies about language continue to underpin 'evidence-led' national policy.

Thanks for reading. Part of the work was supported by @SnellJulia’s @LeverhulmeTrust Research Fellowship and a @LeedsUniEnglish Impact Fund. And please do look at the full article, available open access here: <onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.11… >

The article is part of a special issue on 'Oracy and education: perspective shifts and policy tensions' edited by @DrKarenDaniels1 and @retaylor_ Many thanks to the editors! Watch out for the other articles appearing in early view online...