ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses four British researches – by Joan Tough, Gordon Wells, Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes, and Corinne Hutt and John Hutt and their colleagues. The four studies, although they took place in the 1970s, continue to influence our views on the language of young children and of their homes. Tough's study of the language of preschool children was completed by the early 1970s. Wells raises the issue of whether the marked differences as Tough found between her groups could have been 'an artefact of the way in which the groups were selected'; that is, whether the conclusions would be supported were the full spectrum of family backgrounds from which the school population was drawn to be studied. Tizard and Hughes challenge the formulations about disadvantage in the home and the need to teach working-class parents how to talk with their children, as some interpreted the earlier findings of Tough to suggest.
