Hadaway wi ye

The responses to the story last week about Sacred Heart Primary in Middlesbrough correcting their pupils' use of non-standard English are still coming thick and fast.

The most original is from the author, David Almond, who was born in the North East. In his phonetically written article for The Guardian, he argues that "the commin langwij cums from the hart an sole, and must neva be forgot". It takes a minute to tune in, but it's a good read once you're on his wavelength.

This article in yesterday's Independent on Sunday is great stuff too, because it's written by a genuine expert, a sociolinguist from King's College, London. Here, Julia Snell  shows that it's more than just a question of promoting "good English" - which is what all English teachers are trying to do in pretty much everything they teach - but also to recognise the close link between language and identity.

As Snell says, "Ultimately, it is not the presence or absence of non-standard forms in children's speech that raise educational issues; rather, picking on non-standard voices risks marginalising some children, and may make them less confident at school. Silencing pupils' voices, even with the best intentions, is just not acceptable".

Sadly, this article by a teacher called Pete Turner is less exciting, partly because it has no real style and partly because it's just a rather predictable moan about young people's language. Sorry Pete, but if you'd opened your ears a bit more to some of your students' language styles, it might have made a more engaging read. And as for northerners having large, extended families and southerners getting their slang from grime? Right...

The fact that two of the articles have over 600 responses shows what a live issue this is out there in the real world, not just in our English Language lessons. If you're looking at doing your Language Intervention for ENGA4 coursework in the next few weeks (and you probably should be) then this is exactly the kind of language debate that you should be getting stuck into.

(HT to Ellie Aslin, Jon Dolton and @backwellengdept and @UKLiteracy for first link, Paul Kerwsill via the EMC Facebook page for the second, and Alasdair Mackenzie for the last.)

Edited on Monday 11.02.13 to add 2nd article and restructure references.

Driving up standards by driving out the non-standard

A school in Teesside has become the centre of an argument over acceptable English, with its headteacher's decision to send a letter home to parents asking parents to "correct" their children's language "errors".

According to the local paper, non-standard English such as 'I done it' (rather than 'I did it', or 'I have done it'), 'yous' (instead of 'you') and 'gizit here' (instead of 'give it to me, please') are all considered off-limits at the school, and risk making the children's employment prospects lower than those who use Standard English.

Standard English is what we're supposed to teach at school, and it's what we use to communicate in writing, most of the time - unless we're online or on our phones, in which case different rules apply - but the argument that's been stirred here is over whether it's acceptable to limit what young people say to just Standard English and whether we should be describing these usages as "incorrect".

Schools have tried similar things before,  with Sheffield Springs Academy having a "slang ban" (which is also how the Daily Mail headline about Sacred Heart School in Middlesbrough - mistakenly - puts it in their story), Manchester Academy doing the same a year or two before, and a school in Basildon allegedly trying to eliminate Essex accents through elocution lessons, a claim denied by the school itself.

Linguists have long argued that non-standard varieties of English are not "wrong" at all. In fact, some of them might even be seen as more logical: yous is a perfectly reasonable way of differentiating between second person singular and plural, which Standard English doesn't have, for example. Studying the differences between standard and non-standard is something that Key Stage 2 children do as part of their Literacy curriculum, so it's not as if they don't understand the differences, but is it really OK to ban certain terms or suggest they're inferior.

Peter Stockwell, linguist and Teessider, thinks not and is featured in an interesting follow-up piece. York University's Paul Kerswill, an expert in sociolinguistics (and writer of a damn fine chapter in this book) was interviewed on Radio 4's Today programme this morning, alongside Simon Gibbons of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) and had some eminently sensible things to say about the whole furore.  You can listen to it here until next week and it's 1 hour 40 minutes into the programme.

Elsewhere, the Daily Mail has its take on it here, and you don't need to be a genius to work out that its online readership have plenty to say about it in the comments that follow, which range from the considered and quite descriptivist in outlook (see comment 1 below) to the dubious and rather poorly written (see comments 2&3).

If you've been studying Jean Aitchison's models of crumbling castle, infectious disease and damp spoon, you'll see nearly all of those appearing somewhere in the prescriptive comments put forward, with discourses of laziness, ugliness, infection and erosion, all making an appearance somewhere.

So, what do you think of the school's attempts to drive out non-standard English? Do they have good educational intentions, or are they misguided prescriptivists? Here are what some Mail Online readers thought: what about you?

Comment 1:

The school is just plain wrong. To call informal English wrong is to mess about with personal relationships: this is where you get some children looking down on others because they think they speak wrongly. What is more, it is actually a disadvantage to speak formally if you are in a service industry where you have to get on with ordinary people. You can always tell people who have been trained to talk formally all the time: they sound like daft, unconfident and untrustworthy pseuds. Besides the fact that there are historical reasons for dialect speech: North-eastern dialects use words which go back to the Vikings and put children in touch with a continuing culture which has existed for a thousand years. There is the formal English you need for interviews and work and there is the informal English that enables you to speak quickly with friends, family and locals. All children are capable of understanding that formal English is not right, it is simply for use in formal situations. - Dave , Wimbledon, 06/2/2013 17:24

Comment2:

Sadly, kids nowadays speak only one language and they use that single language in every social context. When I was a kid I spoke three types of English. One with my parents, another with my mates and a third in more formal circumstances such as education, police and other levels of authority. The component that has disappeared today is authority.

- André, Peckham, United Kingdom, 5/2/2013 20:13 

Comment 3:

Laziness from children and parents nowadays...and its shocking. Most kids seem to think talking in slang is cool, but its further from the truth. God help them with job prospects and further education ( if they're even attempting to better their lives! )

- flash25, glasgow, United Kingdom, 5/2/2013 19:41

Stoking up spelling trubble

Does spelling matter? Residents of Stoke-on-Trent seem to think so, because they're worried that people will think they're thick if they see the name of their new shopping development.

This report from the BBC News website suggests that some locals feel that the name will reflect badly on them, while the agency behind the name thinks it gives the development "stand out quality"...maybe like the "stand out quality" of turning up to a funeral in pink lurex batty-riders, or declaring that your football team's new strip will be birthday suits.

Lots of businesses create deliberately deviant spellings to offer "stand out quality". Take Kwiksave, Kwikfit, Krispy Kreme and my old favourite (sadly no longer with us) Mr Byrite. At some point, a creative in an advertising agency decided that Qu and C were just old-fashioned and that K was where it was happening. K was cool...sorry Kool. Is there something intrinsically more exciting about K than C, or is the act of mis-spelling something part of the rebellious appeal of a brand? Vodafone chooses to use f instead of ph and Toys'R'Us abbreviates too, but do we see them as edgy, unconventional brands? Maybe not.

But is it harmless fun, or is this trendy phonetic spelling something that sends out mixed messages to younger people? Is it leading to an acceptance of bad spelling? One teacher quoted in the BBC piece, Mark Rayner, seems to think so:

In terms of grammar we are fighting a battle on many fronts, from text speak, on the internet, even in emails now you find shortened words are creeping in. Pupils regularly write C for see and U for you. But one hopes schools can still teach the correct spelling and grammar.

The need for an agreed spelling system is something that lies at the heart of the notion of Standard English: an accepted and recognised way of using English that provides mutual intelligibility for all speakers and writers. As we've seen many times though, the discussion around what the standard and accepted rules should be is fraught with other, non-linguistic worries.

Some people see apparently declining spelling standards as a measure of a nation's moral collapse (one minute they're spelling Krispy Kreme wrong the next minute they're looting it) while others argue that the English spelling system is so messed up in the first place that it should be radically overhauled.

So, edgy branding or idiotic illiteracy? The last word goes to a resident of Stoke-on-Trent who just says "It makes us look like the people in Stoke are thick".

More is more

intensive reading?

There's a really good response by Melody Dye on the Scientopia blog to the Robert Lane Greene article in the NY times (which I blogged about here) this week.

Dye, who is a cognitive science researcher at Stanford University, argues that Greene's article doesn't go far enough in its attack on prescriptivist thinking and she makes several interesting points about reading as well as writing. She argues - quoting Joshua Foer - that people's reading habits have changed from "intensive" reading of a very few texts to "extensive" reading,  valuing quantity over "quality".

Dye's argument is that as we get more choice over what we read - increasingly being able to pursue our own niche interests in music, film, literature, TV - a bottom-up model of language change is exerting its power more than ever. If standardisation is all about imposing a top-down model then, she argues, what's happening now is that more "writers" (if we're calling texting, tweeting and Facebooking "writing", and I'm happy to) are writing more stuff and it's less standardised than ever before.

extensive reading?

But that does rely on the assumption that standardisation is designed to (as Dye puts it)  "conventionalize, and even ‘crystalize,’ our language according to certain norms, and to make it more uniformly patterned ". Straight after that she adds "Education is one forcible means of (attempting to) root out non-standard ‘grammars’ (such as African American Vernacular English) and of homogenizing usage"...all of which tends to sound to me like she's arguing that education can be a big bad force for social control, a viewpoint that's problematic for me as an English teacher (who wants to see everyone get a good education in a standard form of English) and as a politically left-wing person (who values non-standard forms too and sees them as part of a wider picture of language use), but for two very different reasons.

Does education really have to be like this? Does the teaching of a standard form necessarily preclude an appreciation and study of non-standard varieties? You could argue that the very existence of  Standard English means that all other varieties - and remember, Standard English was chosen very deliberately out of existing varieties of English - are treated as inferior.

You could equally argue though, that if we don't have a standard we have no shared language, no means of communicating with each other on a level playing field and that the ones who will really suffer are not those at the top of society but those at the bottom. In this case, Standard English might be seen as a democratising force, giving linguistic power to everyone in a society.

I suppose what I'd like to see* (and what I think is partly delivered in the English Language A level, if not elsewhere in the English curriculum) is a model like this that opens up the history and development of English as a language, and lets us look at how it became what it is now and where it's going. It should be a model that allows us to interrogate the idea of a standard and see how it's become important over time, while helping students develop their own grasp of that standard, and their understanding of all the non-standard forms around us - many of which like texting and tweeting are in fact changing what might be the Standard English of years to come.

Melody Dye develops her argument by looking outside the natural homes of English - the UK and the USA - too:

In broadening our picture of the forces at work in language change, we might also consider how English is being influenced from the outside.  According to one statistic, there are now something like three times as many non-native speakers of English as there are native speakers.  English is thus being reappropriated by foreign speakers, both on our shores (in the tides of immigrants that come to this country) and off it (in English creoles and pidgins, and in widespread lexical borrowing), and these reformulations are, in turn, shifting the normative space of what is acceptable.

Where this fits in to the study of Language Change and Language Discourses at A level is interesting, I think, and should allow you plenty of scope for discussion and exploration in your work. The English Language is clearly changing - it always has - but is it now changing so quickly, thanks to technology creating so many new users of English all over the world and spreading non-standard forms  - that what we know as Standard English is rapidly disappearing?  Perhaps a new standard is being formed even now, a type of English that we can all understand but which doesn't much resemble the Standard English we've seen before. And maybe that new standard is actually being created away from the places previously considered to be the home of the English language.



Edited 11.46 11/03/11
I'd also like to see world peace and international socialism. Is that not too much to ask?

More on slang and correcting dodgy grammar

Here's a couple of follow-ups to recent stories featured on this blog.

For starters, this is a comment piece by Bob Nicholson in The Guardian which looks at how Victorian English took in American slang, and how the Americanisation of English is hardly a recent phenomenon.

Then there's this piece by Belinda Webb, also from The Guardian, that takes a look at reactions to slang. It's not a particularly brilliant article as the writer appears to confuse dialect and slang, but it's an intervention in the debate about language, so worth a look.

Finally, there's this article about Queen's English Society arch-pedant, Bernard Lamb in last month's Times Higher.

The English Language: it's not doing great

Each day seems to bring another argument about language and how it should be used. It is a great time to be an English Language student, huzzah!

Today's Independent features an opinion piece by Dr. Bernard Lamb, the President of the Queen's English Society (Surely that's a dangerously republican title for a staunchly royalist organisation?) who argues, among other things, for an end to the inverted snobbery and deliberate dumbing down of language that have led to a generation of nitwits not knowing the difference between they're and their. He rails against many other things too: the glottal stop; the lack of capitalisation of proper nouns; using great as an adverb when it's an adjective (Stop press! It's been used as an adverb for a long time. Deal with it!).

And as a professor of genetics, he's obviously eminently qualified to talk about... genetics. So why is he holding forth about language?

Anyway, he does make some sensible points too. There is a really good argument that we all need Standard English as it is a mutually intelligible dialect for all English speakers. If we all have access to Standard English then we all have a chance to communicate with each other, regardless of the region, the social class, the ethnic group or the age group we come from. I wouldn't argue against any of that. But when the definition of Standard English (or the Queen's English as Lamb insists on calling it) spreads like a BP oil slick to cover strong regional accents, glottal stops and the "misuse" of literally, then it's no longer really about a mutually intelligible means of communication and much more to do with personal prejudices.