The central role played by language in mediating school experience and the prestige accorded to standard language varieties within the field of education provide the broad rationale for this paper. This qualitative study, based on a friendship focus-group design, was conducted in two groups of 12-year-old children from contrasting "ideal…

Investigates how teachers perceive the speech of school-aged children and whether the socioeconomic status or level of schooling of the students influences these perceptions. Findings suggest that teachers' judgments of what is problematic and their perception of what causes these problems may differ according to the socioeconomic status of their…

This paper reports a study of the use of non-standard English in the formal speech of 15-year-olds of both genders and of varying attainment levels. The pupils were drawn from two schools on Tyneside which take pupils from catchment areas of markedly different socioeconomic status. Differences were found in the incidence of non-standard lexis and…