ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses in more detail one particularly influential approach to explaining children's educational failure. The chapter explains deprivation theory, a version of the view that educational failure results from a mismatch between children's language and experience, and the language and experience demanded by schools. It sets out to be a theory of the relationship between children's language, social class and educational success. Deprivation theory is obviously of particular relevance to the acquisition of literacy, but has wider relevance to theories of educational success and failure. Contexts tend to be differently defined by different professional groups, and linguists, psychologists, sociologists and educationalists each look at language and see something different. Sociologists, psychologists and educationalists, on the other hand, are interested in language as an explanation of educational failure, having in the past tried IQ, home backgrounds, social class, and other reasons. The main priority must be to increase teachers' understanding of linguistic and cultural diversity.
