Opinionated Article

English opinionated article

Local teachers union furious after school inspectors tell teacher to speak using “Standard English”.

An Essex school have set the task of “Use more of a Central London accent and increase the use of Standard English” following reports from school inspectors. The woman was criticised for her strong “Typical Essex” accent and was labelled as a negative influence on her student’s vocabulary.

I believe this is a stupid claim that the inspectors have made as they are question the abilities of her teaching through the way she speaks. A spokesperson for OFSTED, the official invigilators for schools, claimed that “The objective we recommended was sensible, we believe that Standard English should be used by teacher’s when and wherever possible, the use of colloquial language to the extent that the teacher in question was using is excessive…Additionally, we believe that the accent that teacher spoke in hindered the learning of the children as it was hard to understand.”

 

From this statement, the school in question introduced the recommendations and it sparked outrage from the teachers union. “You could write it off as humorous at first sight but the more and more you think about it, the more offensive it comes across…Everyone who is a part of NASWUT gives every teacher in this situation, regardless of region, our full support”

The question I put forward is what can modern day Standard English be defined as. Standard English has developed drastically over the past centuries. The 21^st century has been a breakthrough for many elements of language, within the past 10 years emoticons and emoji’s (an emoji is a small image, mainly a face, which shows an emotion or depicts an object) have been used so often, that they have developed their own language. Just last week an emoji was voted as oxford dictionaries word of the year.

Additionally, modern accents have changed, the use of Received Pronunciation is in far less of an effect than it was over 200 years ago, nowadays it is associated with those of high status. The evolution of accent has meant that there is now a regional identity linked rather than that of a social class.

A statement from one of the schools members of the English department expressed “The assessment of accent is similar to assessing creativity, how can one determine the factors to asses each when every individual is different? What one person may see as right will be the complete opposed view of another.”

There is an ever increasing expectation for teachers to be perfect, due to new school standards and constant scrutiny from pupils’ parents. How do we expect our children to leave school with good grades if there is a frequent demoralisation of the ones we are expecting to get them there?

I feel that with the introduction of university fees, the government, schools and parents are becoming increasingly panicked about eventual outcomes. The government will lose a massive part of their annual funding, schools will not be able to increase their reputations by having plenty of star students and parents are worried about potentially forking out up £45,000 in university fees. So schools and school organisations look for excuses to take the focus away from them.

The school would have had to have gone through an interview process for potential candidates, during that, they would have heard the teachers accent and from the interview they made a judgement, if they felt it was a problem then they would not have hired her but as soon as a school organisation flags it up, the tip of the school hierarchy joins the band wagon.

The “neuvaux-cockney” accent in which the majority of Essex residents speak has built a reputation for those who use its accent are typically stupid. However the use of constant elision and non-frequency markers doesn’t necessarily conform to the stereotypes. I believe that since the introduction of The Only Way Is Essex, the Essex accent has been given a bad name, because of this, associations such as OFSTED are likely to flag a teacher up on using it, however it is uncontrollable.  

If the teacher were to use certain sociolinguistics whilst teaching her lessons, then there would be an understandable miscommunication. However if this were to be the case then the school have made the wrong assumption. The misconceptions between accent and dialect are commonly mixed up, accent is the way that someone speaks in and the dialect is the vocabulary associated with the regions of those accents.