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Understanding children’s non-standard spoken English: a perspective from variationist sociolinguistics / Stephen Levey
// Language and education 2012, Vol26, N.5 2012p. 405-421 In order for schools to develop systematic and realistic strategies for extending chil¬dren’s linguistic repertoires, it is imperative that teachers and allied professionals have access to scientifically informed accounts of the variable but structured nature of the everyday speech used by children. Because there is insufficient information addressing grammatical variability in school children’s speech, it is easy for teachers to misinter¬pret normal social patterns of variation as the product of error or confusion. This article addresses die lacuna in our understanding of grammatical variation in childhood by presenting a case study of variable subject-verb agreement in the speech of children aged between seven and 11. A detailed quantitative analysis of the co-variation between non-standard and standard variants in children’s discourse reveals a heterogeneous, but intricately patterned, system. Furthermore, socially motivated patterns of variation re¬main stable across the age range examined and are unaffected by increasing exposure to formal education. The tenacity of vernacular norms raises a number of important issues pertinent to the teaching and learning of standard spoken English, including the extent to which children can be expected to substitute standard variants for non-standard ones in spontaneous discourse
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