Linguistic Ethnographic Perspectives on Working-class Children’s Speech: Challenging Discourses of Deficit

Abstract

In February 2013 it was widely reported in national newspapers that the head teacher of a primary school in Teesside, north-east England, had banned the use of spoken Teesside dialect forms in the classroom and written to her pupils’ parents to ask that they do the same at home (e.g. Furness 2013; Williams 2013). The stated reason for this move was the need to give the working-class pupils involved the best possible chance of educational (and later career) success, which for this head teacher meant eradicating eleven ‘incorrect’ words, phrases and pronunciations from the children’s speech (represented in Figure 12.1). This story was of particular interest to me because I happen to be a native of Teesside — one who uses all eleven of these ‘problem’ features — and I have also conducted research on children’s language in this area. As such, I was especially infuriated by the inaccuracies and flawed assumptions evident in this head teacher’s letter to parents (and the media reporting of it) and troubled by the potential damage these might cause to young working-class children. I responded publicly in an article published in The Independent (Snell 2013a), but it was of course impossible to do justice to the issue in the less than 600 words afforded to me. In this chapter I pick up on some of the points addressed in this article, as well as the issues and questions that were raised in the debate surrounding it.