Introduction

If one is interested today in those educational difficulties that seem to follow group lines, one might turn to the literature on multicultural and multi-ethnic education, on diversity in the classroom, on minority-group issues, on cultural heterogeneity, on educational ‘empowerment’, on intergroup and intercultural schooling, and so on. Representative treatments can be found in Banks (1996), Manning and Baruth (2004) and Nieto (2004). Alternatively, if one is especially interested in linguistic matters, the burgeoning field of ‘variationist sociolinguistics’ could recommend itself: see Chambers et al. (2002); see also Chambers (1995), James Milroy (1992) and Lesley Milroy (1987). Part of its obvious remit is the study of dialect differentiation along class lines, and this continues a tradition particularly associated with the work of Labov on the ‘social stratification’ of language (see, for instance, Labov’s [2006] study of English in New York City). Trudgill’s ‘triangle model’ shows how dialect differences become less pronounced as one moves up the social-class hierarchy; as Coulmas (2005: 29) then observes, ‘the speech of the disadvantaged or underclass is more pronouncedly regional than that of middle-class speakers’ (see also Trudgill, 2000, 2002).

The more contemporary research directions rarely, however, get to the heart of difficulties faced by children at school, difficulties often exacerbated by linguistic practices and perceptions. At the ‘macro’ level, for example, the commendable concern with diversity in the classroom often jumps more or less immediately to what I shall style below as the ‘difference’ position. Given the validity of this position (as we shall see), this is entirely reasonable, but it does mean that some real-life problems are rather skipped over. At more ‘micro’ levels, we often find variationist linguists attending to fine-grained distinctions of syntax and pronunciation. It is perhaps telling that, in his chapter on class variation, Coulmas (2005) gives us only one paragraph on the ‘Bernsteinian’ era (see below).