English Spoken Language

From these studies, the place of talk in the classroom remained a major focus of interest for teachers and academics. Subsequent work by the Nuffield Foundation in the 1970’s explored the effect of various classroom lay-outs on the quality of talk; but it was The Bullock Report (1975) which effectively gave official authorisation to oracy, capturing the importance of language in all its forms and its single minded response that ‘… by its very nature a lesson is a verbal encounter through which the teacher draws information from the class, elaborates and generalises it, and produces a synthesis’ (141).
However, creating a system whereby pupils became active participants in their learning coupled with the transformation in teaching styles in …show more content…
Coultas believes this view to be elitist because it challenges the view conveyed in the Bullock Report (1975) ‘… that pupils should not have to leave the language of the home behind them when they enter the classroom’ (Coultas 2012:51). This argument is echoed by Gramsci, (1971) who argues that: ‘The individual consciousness of the overwhelming majority of children reflects social and cultural relations which are different from and antagonistic to those which are represented in the school curricula’ (35). Therefore the government’s insistence that the new curriculum promotes the use of Standard English even in informal classroom conversations (DfE 2013) would seem to undermine the social and cultural history that all children bring to the classroom. This could encourage teachers to start ‘correcting’ pupils’ spoken language and ‘criticise pupils who use colloquial language or non-standard dialects as happened in the past’ (Coultas 2012:52). This would seem to make a strong connection with Brice-Heath’s findings of American school children and their alienation in terms of language and culture when they began their school