you talk posh sir sorry posture you
sound dead posh sir sir are your parents
posh sir sir are you really rich sir
sir do you live in a mansion or
something sir sir are you really posh
sir it’s a it’s not a question I was
expecting to be honest I mean nobody
expects to be accused to being posh on a
Monday morning I mean I guess I might I
don’t I grew up in a flat with no
central heating above a shop my parents
all they left school at 15 16 with three
oh levels between them all of which are
my mother’s I’ve seen a mansion I like
to look off but to be honest on these
wages I’m not moving in anytime soon now
it’s 2016 I’m in stoke-on-trent in the
Midlands of England and I’m teaching at
a Sixth Form College if you like the
last stopping off point between the
world of high school and the adult world
of work or university I’m working with a
group of 16 to 19 year old students who
are resetting their GCSE in English
language a qualification that they have
all been told that they will need to
pass if they have any chance of going on
to that University or snagging that top
apprenticeship or even getting a job
that pays anything more than minimum
wage the class the moment doing a little
project into how they speak thinking
about attitudes to accents and dialects
hence this posh question which has
thrown me so I asked this girl to
clarify our terms what do you mean
posh and as we talked it through a
couple of things become apparent firstly
whatever posh is it’s a good thing it’s
a compliment sir it’s good to be posh
sir and secondly whatever posh is it’s
not like the way I talk sir I hate the
way our talks
I hate the local accent I do sir it’s so
chappy now education in this country
especially the teaching of literacy and
orosi reading and writing speaking and
listening has taken a prescriptivists
view of language that is to say we teach
our kids that there’s a right way to say
it and a right way to spell it and in
fact we teachers are expected to
reinforce that orthodoxy you’ll hear in
the press about Ofsted inspectors
criticizing teachers for teaching in too
strong a local accent ah the shock the
crime but it’s my concern that perhaps
that approach is having a detrimental
effect on our young people and on our
communities but before I unpack that any
further go into the present and then
think about a possible future we better
take a step back into the past to find
out why I’ve started thinking like this
in fact if I take you back to the 1970s
a time when the relatively recent
invention of the portable tape recorder
has allowed intrepid linguists like
William Labov here to get out of the oak
paneled rooms of academia and hit the
streets in search of real people using
real language in real communities the
birth of what we now call
sociolinguistics labove is particularly
noted for his research into
african-american vernacular English at a
time when the prevailing belief in
America was that somehow the language of
black communities was some sort of
debased or degenerate version of the
supposedly perfect English spoken by
white folks if you like part of a bundle
of racially prejudiced views used to
explain away conveniently the
underachievement
of certain communities in our world now
labove studies and studies like it were
able to prove that African American
English was grammatically no less
complex no less able to express
sophisticated ideas than the
supposedly standard white English the
kids growing up in inner-city inner-city
Philadelphia in those black communities
did not have a deficit of language
lahbab concluded but their language at
home and the language of the classroom
were significantly different a
difference which was not always fully
appreciated he concluded by teachers now
the bob was not the only person looking
into this continuing through our past we
also find the research of Shirley Brice
Heath Heath again in the 1970s and into
the 1980s was carrying out a long-term
study into the success or lack of
success of two communities now these
communities were in America in the
Carolinas in the 1970s in the 1980s but
one of them I thought was some striking
resemblances to the community that I
find myself in in stoke-on-trent in 2016
Heath writes about Road Ville road bill
was a blue-collar town working-class
through and through a town built on the
back of the textiles industry the mills
had built that town and the mills had
provided the jobs and security and pride
for that town but times were changing
the mills weren’t gonna be there forever
and people were looking to education to
give their kids other opportunities
those of us in stoke-on-trent who have
seen the decline of the Potteries
industry might already be thinking yeah
that kind of sounds familiar now the
people of Road bill were not stupid and
the people of Road Ville were not
illiterate they took seriously the job
of educating their own children to read
and to write but those children by the
time they reached just fourth grade were
already falling behind in standardized
literacy tests when compared to the
children of suburban privileged poor
communities you see what studies like
Heath and like nabobs suggests to us is
that
actually school at the end of the day
isn’t too much worried about whether you
can read and write whether you can speak
and listen if anything they take that as
given what schools interested in is the
way you read and write the way you speak
and listen and that different
communities as Heath put it had
different ways with words trouble being
all the teachers were working from the
point of view of just one community they
already privileged in school to get by
you don’t have to be literate you have
to be literate and posh so fast forward
to 2016 to stoke-on-trent
me in a room full of 16 to 19 year old
bright vibrant enthusiastic people who
still need to pass that GCSE in English
language now Stoke is a city undergoing
change and it’s a city that face faces
challenges like Pete’s Road Ville it’s a
city whose industrial heyday is probably
behind it now and whose kids are looking
to education to give them other
opportunities
unlike the Bob’s Philadelphia it’s those
folks whose language at home differs
most from the idealized standard
language of the classroom who face the
most challenges and the most deprivation
now this is having an impact not only on
individual students but on those whole
communities recent research by
contemporary British linguists Leach and
Montgomery working up in Sheffield has
been looking at attitudes to language in
stoke-on-trent rather like my GCSE
students themselves were Leach and
Montgomery have found some very very
interesting and troubling things if you
speak to people in stoke-on-trent about
their voice about accent and dialect
folks in Stoke will speak
enthusiastically about the Potteries
voice they’re proud of the Potteries
voice the Potteries voice is a voice
that represents honesty decency hard
work
it’s a voice they’re proud of the voice
of their mothers their grandmothers the
voice of the pot banks of Wedgwood and
Spode but if you speak to people in
Stoke they’ll tell you that voice is
dying out you don’t hear it so much
anymore they’ll tell you what they’ll
tell you is replacing it is something
that they refer to as the stokke accent
now the stokke accent folks in Stoke
will tell you sounds common it sounds
thick it sounds lazy as the girl in my
class put it it sounds shabby
leach and Montgomery have analyzed those
two voices and have found something
deeply troubling they are structurally
identical they are the same voice what’s
happening in this city is not the people
are changing the way they speak but our
communities are changing the way they
perceive themselves as an educator as a
teacher I’m deeply worried what if I’m
what what I am doing and the way I’m
doing it is not helping young people
what if what I’m doing in the way I’m
doing is alienating young people and
further entrenching social inequality
and social immobility that those in
power would claim to be against it’s a
troubling thought and that’s why I would
suggest to you that we need to work
towards a future education system that
moves away from that fetishization of
one English over all the other English’s
a future education system where all
varieties of English are celebrated
equally a future education system which
does not say you cannot pass unless you
sound posh English teachers like to
think we already do this will tell you
oh it’s okay because we teach people
about writers of other cultures and
writers of different cultures that’s
great but you only get to be in other
culture or a different culture if you
are other than or different from the one
that we set up as the ideal in the first
place there’s loads of
and loads of speaking out there in all
kinds of English that deserves to be
heard and analyzed and loved on its own
feet for its own qualities equality and
diversity are not the same thing even if
we package them together you can’t have
equality in a diverse range of language
if you’re gonna set up one English as
the benchmark by which all other
English’s are measured for their novelty
value that doesn’t do anyone any good
but it’s not just the English classroom
it’s all classrooms it comes down to an
attitude that we’re promoting every time
we interact with students the classroom
of 2016 is still a place where you can
ask a perfectly sensible question like
sir
can I go toilet and be told well if you
mean may I go to the toilet then yes you
reinforcing an orthodoxy which could
potentially be one of the most damaging
messages we are teaching young people
the English that I use is good English
the English your community uses though I
understand it well enough to correct you
is bad English thus to be good to be
valued to be heard you must be more like
me and less like yourself now that’s a
point of view built on bias and built on
prejudice and flies in the face of all
these researchers so I proposed you
instead a future English education
system in which we move away from a
chauvinism of English’s a future
education system in which the brightest
kid in the class does not fear being
overlooked simply because she has used
the wrong English to express herself a
future education system in which the
language of all is celebrated for the
benefit of all and where a more
representative number
of voices of non-white backgrounds and
white voices of non privileged
backgrounds get to be the voices at the
front of the class during the teaching
because we’ve not had to disguise
ourselves to get there a future in which
to pass your exams you don’t have to
pass for posh we need that future by the
way because right now in the present 1.2
billion people are using English’s as we
speak speaking and listening and reading
and writing face to face and on the
Internet 1.2 billion English’s and what
a few million of us might claim that the
standard English of the GCSE syllabus is
our native language at home why are we
limiting academic success to students
who are willing to adopt one minority
dialect from one little island when
there’s a whole world of English out
there sir sir you talk posture
sir you posh sir well no no I’m not but
when I was your age someone told me that
I had to speak like this and I had to
write like that otherwise I would have
mount to nothing sir sir
that’s stupid sir yes yes it is isn’t it [Applause]