ABSTRACT
For me, one of the more regrettable themes to have run through most of my teaching career is the myth of the ‘children who have no language’. The origins of this belief are too complex to trace in detail here, though readers who would like to explore its historical antecedents can find further reading in the notes for this chapter. Often, the idea seems to have originated in a misreading of the work of Basil Bernstein.1 Almost always it was, indeed sometimes still is, children from families of low socioeconomic status who are labelled like this. I well remember, for example, standing in the entrance hall of a primary school on a large housing estate somewhere in south-west England, with the head teacher explaining to me that the children had no language, the reason being that they came from homes where there was no language. At that very moment, a meeting of the children’s parents was taking place in the school hall a few feet away from where we were standing. The noise of conversation was deafening. As the head spoke, I looked pointedly in the direction of the din, but without eliciting any response. What is frequently meant, of course, when such judgements are made, is not that the children are literally dumb, but that they don’t behave, linguistically, as the teachers would like them to. Language is acquired in a specific context. For most children this means first of all in their own homes, amongst parents and other caregivers. Sometimes children find the classroom a very different context for talk, and one which is not so supportive.
