ABSTRACT
I can remember when I first took a Reception class complaining to a colleague about the ‘poor’ language of the children in my class, ‘Why, they can’t even ask to go to the toilet properly’, I grumbled. ‘Well’, Martin replied somewhat carefully, ‘I don’t know about you, but in our house we don’t ask to go to the toilet, we just go.’ Although my first reaction was to laugh, my inward reaction was one of mild indignation. My expectation, perfectly laudable, was that the child, after raising her hand, should say ‘Please Mrs Hubbard, may I go to the toilet?’ As their teacher I was there to help the children, many from a deprived socioeconomic background, to achieve and one of the best ways of doing this was to encourage them to speak ‘properly’ as soon as possible in order to reach the level of literacy that I wanted for them. On speaking to other Reception class teachers I found that their complaints echoed mine. We wanted the children to succeed academically and at the same time to speak clearly, succinctly and to the point, preferably in sentences, and with socially appropriate language. What we wanted was a culturally specific language reflecting our own backgrounds as teachers, and if the child did not match this then they and their parents were regarded as deficient in some way. Parents were censured in particular – after all where had the children been the last five years?
