Preamble

In the years since this volume was first published new theoretical paradigms and concepts have emerged, existing ones have been revised and incorporated into research methodologies, and new empirical studies have appeared which significantly add to knowledge. In what follows we will briefly review these ideas, and show they apply to the arguments made in the original version of the chapter as well as evaluate their import for educational communicative processes. We have decided to present the argument as a decade‐by‐decade progression of ideas and findings, the focus however remains on interactional sociolinguistics in the study of schooling.

The 1960s: from linguistic deficit to cultural and linguistic diversity

Systematic research on language in education began in the 1960s largely in response to concerns with what was then regarded as ‘minority group school failure’. At the time it was assumed that while children may have come to school with different sociocultural backgrounds, what counted was how written language was presented in the classroom (Graham 1980). Wherever school failure was attributed to children's language use it was regarded as a matter of innate ability. Attempting to counter the biological determinism, and implicit racism of these views, educators turned to the work of anthropologists (Lewis 1960) and sociologists (Glazer and Moynihan (1963) to argue that the poverty and cultural deprivation of inner‐city families had led to ‘linguistic deprivation’ reflected in non‐standard grammar and inadequate reasoning ability, and that these were the major causative factors of school failure (Hess and Shipman 1966).