Raspberry column and "verbal skills"

[Timothy Mason]

Here is a ling to a report in the Observer on recent work carried out
in the UK. The results suggest that skill-differences between
working-class and middle-class children are already significant at
the age of 22 months.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/education/story/0,12554,837171,00.html

An article in today's Guardian looks at other findings by the same
researcher (Leon Feinstein)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1034403,00.html

She writes :

>very bright children from poor homes and dim but rich babies at the
>other end of the scale were already on a steep trajectory in the
>opposite directions, the poor/bright travelling fast downwards, the
>rich/dim moving up. By nursery school at three, they have nearly
>converged. At the age of six, the children's lines cross and then
>diverge for evermore as they head off into opposite futures.

This suggests that whatever schools or stupid teachers may be doing,
the social factors underlying educational inequalities cannot all be
blamed on the educational system. It also seems that language is a
cognitive skill like any other, that skill in this domain is variable
and that it varies for the same reasons as others do.

Personally, this does not surprise me ; I worked for ten years
training French primary-school teachers ; while much could be said
about their recruitment and training, it was clearly the case that
the majority of them cared about the children they were to teach,
were aware of the difficulties faced by those in the underprivileged
suburban schools that most young teachers start their careers in, and
did their best to ensure that their young charges succeeded in
mastering the material on the curriculum.

School labeling processes coupled with a system of triage that puts
children under increasing levels of stress may well play a role in
the widening of the skill gap. But schooling alone does not account
for it.

Best wishes

Timothy Mason
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20030903/8d4ce7fe/attachment.htm>