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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 977

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

What do teachers regard as linguistic competence?

Authors: Mayr, Katharina; Wiese, Heike
Submitted by: Mayr, Katharina (University of Potsdam, Germany)

Children in urban European schools bring with them a linguistic repertoire that typically encompasses a range of varieties and styles, such as local vernaculars, multiethnic youth languages, traditional regional dialects, and other variants of the majority language and, possibly, of a family’s heritage language(s). This rich linguistic repertoire is often overlooked when teachers evaluate students’ linguistic competence.

Reporting from Germany, we show that competences in nonstandard varieties tend to be neglected in favour of those in the academic language of school settings, a linguistic variety that shows a number of peculiarities (cf. Cathomas 2005, Gogolin 2006, Schroeder 2007) and is comparably close to middle class language use, thus favouring children coming from those social strata. This can lead to an underestimation of linguistic competences by children coming from non-middle class and/or migrant backgrounds, and support linguistic myths in education such as that of “double semilingualism” in the case of multilingual children.

Such misconceptions at school can have negative effects at a number of levels (Wiese 2012:Ch.6). They can undermine students’ linguistic and academic self-perception, and can lead to experiences of stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson 1995), and they bring with them the risk of self-fullfilling prophecies in the classroom (Boehlert 2005, Schofield 2006).

We present studies that investigate teachers’ perceptions of nonstandard varieties and their views of what constitutes linguistic competences, and show that teachers tend to have a strong ideological alliance with the standard, follow a substantially monolingual habitus, and neglect situational choices of different linguistic variants. Taken together, this leads to evaluations where deviations from a monolingual standard are regarded as evidence for a lack of linguistic proficiency independently of the speech situation, and as an obstacle for educational success.

In view of this, we argue for components of teachers’ training that support an awareness of the underlying ideologies that guide attitudes towards language, perceptions of speakers, and views of linguistic competence, and we suggest some exemplary materials in support of this.

Boehlert, Martha (2005). Self-fulfilling prophecy. In: Steven W. Lee (Ed.), Encyclopedia of School Psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. pp.491-492.

Cathomas, Rico (2005). Schule und Zweisprachigkeit [‘School and Bilingualism’]. Waxmann: Münster.

Gogolin, Ingrid (2006). Bilingualität und die Bildungssprache der Schule [‘Bilingualism and the Academic Language of School’]. In: Paul Mecheril & Thomas Quehl (Eds.), Die Macht der Sprachen. Münster: Waxmann. pp.63-85.

Schofield, Janet W. (2006). Migration Background, Minority Group Membership and Academic Achievement. Berlin: AKI Research Review 5.

Schroeder, Christoph (2007). Integration und Sprache [‘Integration and Language’]. APuZ 22.23: 6-12.

Steele, Claude M., & Aronson, Joshua (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69; 5: 797–811.

Wiese, Heike. Kiezdeutsch. Ein neuer Dialekt entsteht [‘Kiezdeutsch: A New Dialect Emerges’]. München: C.H. Beck.