At the chalkface: Talking proper

Is it part of our job to monitor our pupils’ speech? To teach them to talk proper? Of course not.

Their speech is who they are, their very identity. They own it, they control it. It keeps us out. Go to any urban street corner and the young seem to be speaking in hip moon language, fast, fly, fractured, witty, passionate, full of put-ons, present tenses and truncated sentences – and grammatically off the map. “Signifying jive,” as jazz musicians used to call it. A rich mix. Lovely stuff.

But we do need to make pupils aware of the politics of language, of its context. I remember thrilling lessons on dialect, accent, register, codes, the demotic, colloquial, vernacular and tribal – and the dread Received Pronunciation. Pupils have to master this as well. It’s a weapon of survival, especially for the “working class”. Your life may depend on it, though things have loosened up since I were a lad in the 1950s.