Will Jim Fix Our Broken Spoken English? Oo Kaerz? I 4 1

Civitas, 28 April 2009

According to a report in yesterday’s Times, among the recommendations in the about-to-be-published final report of the Rose review of primary education is one calling for primary schools to teach their pupils to ‘recognise when to use formal language, including standard spoken English’.

Since standard English tends to be favoured by the English upper- and middle- classes as their spoken idiom in even the most informal of contexts, the Rose review must have been proceeding on the understandable, if not entirely accurate, assumption England’s primary schoolchildren today come exclusively from working-class or under-class backgrounds where standard English is not the natural idiom.

Given the steady proletarianisation of the country under New Labour, accelerated by last week’s deplorable budget, such an assumption would seem to have been not an entirely unrealistic or unreasonable one, at least as a working hypothesis.

What is really intriguing is whether the Rose report will recommend that England’s primary schools teach their pupils to recognise lessons as being among the occasions when use of standard English in speech is more appropriate than any other form of dialect. If it does, that will be a good thing. If it doesn’t, that will be a very bad one.

Over and above the question whether English primary schoolchildren should be encouraged to use standard English when they speak in class, there is the far more moot and sensitive question whether they should also be encouraged by their schools to speak standard English with the received pronunciation.

I am of the view that they should be so encouraged at school, even when their families speak English with some other form of regional accent. The reasons for my preferences in the two cases are somewhat different in each case.

The main reason why I think English children should be encouraged at school to use standard English in their speech is that doing so will enable them better to learn the English language, virtually all of whose great literature that they will be most likely to encounter during their formal education will have been written in variants of it.

Speaking standard English will also help them better understand English that is spoken in that idiom, as nearly all will be of what they will be told during their formal education that they will need to understand.

In the case of spoken English, part of the reason why it is preferable  for English schoolchildren to learn to speak it with the received pronunciation is that acquiring such a pronunciation will make it easier for them to be able to discern the correct spelling of words. Hence their learning to speak English with the received pronunciation will make it easier for them to write English correctly.

More importantly, however, their speaking English with the received pronunciation will also make it easier for them to make themselves understood when speaking to those who are not their immediate family or friends. One reason that it is desirable for them to acquire such a capacity is that it is one any future employer of theirs will be likely to want them to have, insofar as most jobs today  call upon those performing them to communicate with those who do not come from the same locality as they have grown up in.  Since the received pronunciation is that which tends to be used by those who appear in any form of professional capacity in the national media, it is an accent with which most people are likely to  be familiar in addition to whichever happens to be the regional accent of their place of birth and upbringing.  Hence, it is an accent with which most people are likely to be familiar and hence is that which is most likely to be understood by anyone.  Since speaking English with the received pronunciation will make someone more easily understood, it is likely also to make them more employable and for that reason, apart from any other,  its use should be encouraged at school.

I doubt whether the Rose review will share either of my two preferences: — viz. that standard English always be expected to be spoken in classroom by schoolchildren; and that it should always be encouraged to be spoken there with the received pronunciation.

If it turns out that it does and recommends that they be adopted, this will mark a big advance on what the Cox Report on English of 1989. Not only did that report decry schools encouraging their pupils to speak with the Received Pronunciation. It also decried schools encouraging the use of standard English as the spoken idiom of the classroom.

Thus not only did the Cox Report assert that:

‘We do not see it as the school’s place to enforce the accent known as the Received Pronunciation.’

It also asserted that:

‘Teachers should not treat non-standard dialect as sub-standard language but should recognise the… damage which can be caused by indiscriminate “correction” of dialect forms. All children should be supported in valuing their own dialects.’

I beg to differ with Cox on both counts.

Whether the Rose Report sides with me or with Cox on these matters remains to be seen. Personally, I am not counting on it siding with me.

Only if it does, however, will Jim have helped fix the broken spoken English that makes of all too many of our public spaces the squalid ugly arenas that they are today.