Understanding children's non-standard spoken English: a perspective from variationist sociolinguistics

Abstract

In order for schools to develop systematic and realistic strategies for extending children's linguistic repertoires, it is imperative that teachers and allied professionals have access to scientifically informed accounts of the variable but structured nature of the everyday speech used by children. Because there is insufficient information addressing grammatical variability in school children's speech, it is easy for teachers to misinterpret normal social patterns of variation as the product of error or confusion. This article addresses the lacuna in our understanding of grammatical variation in childhood by presenting a case study of variable subject-verb agreement in the speech of children aged between seven and 11. A detailed quantitative analysis of the co-variation between non-standard and standard variants in children's discourse reveals a heterogeneous, but intricately patterned, system. Furthermore, socially motivated patterns of variation remain stable across the age range examined and are unaffected by increasing exposure to formal education. The tenacity of vernacular norms raises a number of important issues pertinent to the teaching and learning of standard spoken English, including the extent to which children can be expected to substitute standard variants for non-standard ones in spontaneous discourse.

Keywords:

• variation
• non-standard English
• children
• National Curriculum
• grammar
• primary school education
• sociolinguistic analysis
• educational policy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the children and the staff in the school where I carried out this research for their unfailing cooperation.

Notes

1. The codes in square brackets relate to speaker details in the preadolescent corpus. The initial digits identify the individual speaker; M indicates that the speaker is male and F indicates that the speaker is female; the number at the end of the coding sequence refers to speaker age: 7/8 refers to a speaker aged between 7 and 8, and 10/11 refers to a speaker aged between 10 and 11. All examples are reproduced verbatim from the original audio recordings.

2. This information was abstracted from the Office for Standards in Education.

3. This figure represents the percentage of non-standard was in contexts of standard were in affirmative contexts only.

4. Hudson and Holmes (1995) report that in their survey of the non-standard spoken English of 11- to 15-year-olds, females exhibited a tendency to select standard variants more often than males.

5. This pattern has also been detected in rural varieties (see Britain 2002).

6. Cheshire (1999, 138) draws parallels with the invariant presentative constructions in French (il y a) and German (es gibt).

7. This reverse pattern is currently referred to as the Southern Subject Rule (Cheshire and Fox 2009, 32).

8. The range value is calculated by subtracting the lowest factor weight from the highest factor weight in a statistically significant factor group and expressing the difference as a whole integer.

9. The data are too sparse to permit multivariate analysis of non-standard were.

10. This research compares prescribed usage with the actual use of both teachers and students in French-speaking schools in Quebec, Canada.