Raspberry column and "verbal skills"

[Laura Miller]

Ron and Karl have asked us to consider something critical about this issue. If someone has the linguistic background that enables them to get into college, like Karl's friend, yet they are still  not considered "academic" material, isn't it exactly middle-class social and cultural knowledge they are thought to lack? Many working-class people are incredibly "verbally skilled," much more so than some of the shy and halting scholars or windbag academics I hang out with. I can point to the case of a women with only a 9th grade education, who had an enormous vocabulary and used it extensively with her five children, yet all but one eventually dropped out of high school. It wasn't because they "lacked verbal skills." (The one that stayed in school eventually became an anthropologist).

The manner in which class-based knowledge and norms are deflected onto language is known to us, so why are we so eager to believe the validity or usefulness of this study? For one thing, how does one really "count" utterances?
Laura




>>> Ronald Kephart <rkephart at unf.edu> 09/01/03 17:44 PM >>>
A couple of thoughts, not definitive but just to keep the ball rolling...

At 10:58 PM +0200 9/1/03, Timothy Mason wrote:

>I said in my last post that there are good grounds for accepting
>[that "variations in linguistic skill... can be explained - at least
>in part -  by differences in parental practices"].

I think we have to be very careful about what is meant by "linguistic
skill" here. Do we really mean that the children in question are not
competent users of Language, or do we mean that they aren't competent
users of the accepted dialect?

Also, I had the impression (from Raspberry) that the researchers were
more focused on vocabulary and, by extension, cultural knowledge than
*language* per se. We know from Labov, way back, that children of
poor parents are not really linguistically deficient; they just use
language differently from what is expected in the school situation.

>The [view of "these differences as culturally determined, and
>deep-rooted, on the other hand, is based in a strong - and to my
>mind erroneous - model of cultural determinism."]

But, don't we have pretty good ethnographic work from a number of
places that brings out exactly the cultural component in language
socialization practices?  I don't have my references handy
(everything's in boxes) but the folks on this list probably know more
about this than I do, anyway, and I think some *are* the
ethnographers in question. Anyhow, when Raspberry notes that:

"For example, the 11- to 18-month-old children of professionals
(mostly university professors in the study) heard 642 utterances
during a typical hour, with 482 of these addressed to the children
themselves. Children of welfare parents heard an average 394 such
utterances, with only 197 directly addressed to them."

My question would be: Does this variation fall inside or outside the
bounds that we see from cross-cultural ethnographic investigation?
The answer to *that* question, it seems to me, is key to
understanding how to confront this "problem."

Finally...

>The edge that the children of the middle-classes have in the
>schooling game is primarily *linguistic*...

I'm not so sure. What middle-class children have, in my view
(informed by my experiences working with children in the Caribbean)
is a leg up on the social and cultural knowledge required to *use*
their very considerable linguistic skills in ways that get them
rewarded in schools and in the larger society.

Sorry to stick with Timothy for now. Karl Reisman has put forward
some good and stimulating thoughts, as well, but I'm mentally stuck
on this aspect of the issue for the moment. My main concern is that
we not return to the 1950s; the music was ok, but the idea that
certain groups of people had mass cases of "linguistic deficit" was
not.

Ron

--
Ronald Kephart
Associate Professor
Sociology, Anthropology, & Criminal Justice
University of North Florida
http://www.unf.edu/~rkephart