Dialect Features and Linguistic Conflict in Schools

Abstract

Abstarct This paper analyses some of the educational problems that can arise from a lack of awareness of the systematic differences between standard English and non‐standard English dialects. Research in Reading, Berkshire, found that children used fewer dialect features in writing than in their vernacular speech style, but that they also used a number of hypercorrect forms in writing that did not occur in speech. The marking strategies that teachers adopted could not help their dialect‐speaking pupils. The linguistic and more general implications of this situation are extremely serious, since the majority of school children in Britain speak a non‐standard variety of English.