Slang Ban in Sheffield School

By -
According to a Daily Mail article, a school in Sheffield, UK, has banned the use of slang on the school premises. Apparently, this measure has been taken to ensure that the students master Queen's English and "professional culture" in preparation for post-school employment. To anybody who grew up in a British colony, this is old news. In the colonial era, it was standard policy to ban children from speaking their indigenous languages at school: students who slipped up were subjected to humiliating punishment. As a consequence, indigenous language use was stigmatized.

Not surprisingly, the move by the Sheffield school has some critics, some of whom point out that banning the use of slang will have a negative impact on students' self-confidence. Others express concern about the logistics behind the ban: "'Who is going to adjudicate? Who is going to say slang, dialect or accent? And which one is right and which one is wrong?" These are all valid questions.

As for me, I am curious about the story behind the story. I find myself wondering why there is no concrete indication in the article that previous students from the school have had a hard time getting jobs and navigating through the professional world. From my perspective, if there is an actual problem that this new policy has been set up to fix, then why isn't the problem being explicitly identified? Why aren't the readers being presented with reams of data showing that slang has limited former students' chances at career success? Why aren't employers being consulted on this issue? Does this oversight reflect a half-baked job on the part of the journalists writing on this subject, or it more indicative that the school didn't do its homework?

I also find myself wondering why the school would come up with a schoolwide ban on the use of slang when all they really need to do is ban the use of slang in the classroom? Does it really matter what language the students speak when they get together to gossip and have a few laughs at break time or lunch time? And is it even possible, in practical terms, to put such a broad policy into action? For the record, I am not opposed to any move to ban slang within the classroom. I do think that language standards are falling in different national contexts, and that students are not getting the necessary linguistic reinforcement they need to master the official languages. So a form of intervention is necessary. However, the most effective form of intervention would entail making better use of classroom time.

 This work is licensed to Rose Kahendi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. 

Comments

  1. Stephen @affordable essay writing servicesFebruary 25, 2012 at 7:37 PM

    I agree with your point that it is still better for students to make better use of classroom time. I also agree that it is immaterial what form of language the students use if they will only gossip during their free time.

    However, I believe that students should be trained while in school to use the appropriate language - language spoken by professionals. For this reason, I believe that the use of slang should be banned in schools. Students who get used to speaking it give an impression that they are unprofessional. There are a lot of negative connotations associated with use of slang in the professional world.

    I have written persuasive essays against use of slang in schools. http://www.ewritegigs.com/persuasive-essay-against-the-use-of-slang-in-schools/. I hope you will find it informative and convincing

    ReplyDelete
  2. R KahendiFebruary 27, 2012 at 9:22 AM

    Thanks for your comment, Stephen. I honestly think that if teachers are doing what they are supposed to do, slang should not be used in the classrooms. After all, the language of instruction is supposed to be standard English. It's the regulation of language outside the actual classroom that I think defeats the purpose.

    I also believe that any school worth its salt should have career preparation sessions for its students. This includes tips on resume/ CV preparation, writing job application letters and doing mock job interviews. These are actually exercises that could be incorporated into English courses.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In America, everything is politicized

By -
When I read this article , I had to laugh. It brought to mind a conversation I once had with my friend, Maina, a Kenyan living in the US. We were both attending an event organized by an African American student group. Some of the African American women attending the event were dressed in the best of African couture, but there was a distinct difference between the way they carried themselves and the way a Kenyan or Tanzanian woman dressed in a similar outfit would have carried herself. I put it down to the fact that the American women probably felt self-conscious in their dresses. Maina, who had lived in the country longer, had another theory. He figured that Americans didn’t know how to simply be. Everything they took up, every cultural practice or idea they picked up from another nation, they had to repackage, politicize and turn into a movement . I shook my head in doubt, but Maina smiled. “Believe me,” he said, “this lady in the Kitenge is probably wearing it to express politi
Read more

Salvaging The Help, a film worth watching

By -
The Melissa Harris-Perry Show On Saturday morning (yesterday) I watched the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC. The segment of the show that struck me the most was the one during which Harris-Perry and her panel of guests focused their attention on the film, The Help . The discussion was of interest to me because I had read many critiques of the film last year, shortly after it had been released. They had been tremendously negative, and had highlighted many of the film’s flaws. One of them had been the fact that the film hadn't been a historical portrayal of life for black domestic workers and their families. The critics had pointed out that the film glossed over the absolute brutality of racism in the Jim Crow South, and had emphasized that the physical violence and sexual abuse suffered by black women in the homes where they worked received no direct attention. Additionally, they had highlighted the fact that the black men featured in the film tended to be abusive spouses, in
Read more

Believe it or not, polygamy isn't evil

By -
It intrigues me greatly that mainstream American society, which is open to all sorts of ideas about sexual identity and different family types, is so intolerant of polygamy. I can understand, to some degree, where this intolerance comes from. Polygamy, as it has been practiced in the United States and elsewhere, has done its fair share to create rigid hierarchies, inequality and resentment within families. It is precisely the sort of situation that could facilitate exploitation and abuse, and in the case of Warren Jeffs of the FLDS Church, it has done just that. In sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, where polygamy is part and parcel of various communities’ traditional practices, there are many cases where the institution has been abused to force teenage girls into marriage to older men. However, it would be dismissive to run up a catalog of all the evils that have been committed in the name of polygamy and then say that was the full story about it. The truth of the matter is
Read more