Journal article review

“Educational implications of the deficit/deprivation hypothesis in L2 situations: A case of Zimbabwe”

Basil Bernstein (1973) language deprivation theory or the deficit hypothesis has claimed that middle class members have more opportunities and access ways of organizing their speech than working class members and because of their habitual surrounding these working class people have less capability of learning a language than middle class members. In the context of the linguistic situation of Zimbabwe, this paper discuss and criticize how this theory is applied in second language acquisition of Zimbabwean’s and how it effect to children  on acquiring a second language.

However various sociolinguistics like Broughton et. al (1978) have done a lot of research on the deprivation theory and they believe that the children’s social and economic background influences on their linguistic incompetence. Likewise Bernstein’s deficit theory also concern learner’s linguistic incompetence in terms of their social class.  As the working class children linguistic performance are slower than the middle class children to investigates the matter further he has divided the society into two classes and fit it into either restricted or elaborated code. According to Manor (2008) these term itself gives a wrong impression and it is criticize among linguistics. As the result he modified this theory instead of claiming that all working class people would use the restrict code and the middle class people to use elaborated code, he later claims that as middle class people have access to both codes and the working class people were likely to have access only to the restricted code.

As this research is mainly based on the discussion and criticizing of his theory, the theorist’s main concerns are understanding and identifying the differences between the Zimbabwe’s working class and middle class children’s language acquisition.  To find out this, the theorist have done various researches by observing how these children’s learn, interact, communicate and also the difficulties they faced on learning a language in the classroom context.

Basically this research discuss that, even though working class children have limited access to elaborated code they need to learn it in schools which  includes  learning about cultures.  As it is a disadvantage for these children compare to middle class children their performance are extremely low. In addition the teachers label them and underestimates their capability, even they do not expect these children to perform like other children as a result of the children get demotivated and negative attitude leads them to failure.

Furthermore, findings in this study supported of the hypothesis to certain extent that the African black child from social class language code are restricted and it exists in Zimbabwe schools. For instance when these children eliminate non- standard speech, it considered as wrong. Similarly they were expected to construct a full sentence using proper grammar and vocabulary which is not important in their culture besides they were evaluated on their ability to use elaborated code.

To recapitulate in short, even though this hypothesis mainly argues the linguistic incompetence of people from different classes which is certainly bias on so called middle class category it has some  important implications like accepting and  including both restricted code and elaborated code in social and academic institutions. However as his argument imply that elaborated code more superior and since children from restricted code has limited access on the superior code they were not able to understand and accept this code.  Therefore, it gives an impression that working class children are inherently not capable of learning a language as middle class children.

Generally what I learn from these findings and in my opinion I believe that the cognitive ability of children acquiring and performing a language are not depended on their social class  rather it depends on the way they were treated and thought by the teacher and the capabilities of giving opportunities and motivation from their learning environment. If the educators are able to motivated the children and built a positive attitude towards the language and culture the more they desire to learn it.

 In Maldivian context, even though this society do not have much social difference among learning and teaching a second language to some extent there is a difference in children’s performance among the more civilize region and less civilize region. Similarly as I mentioned the reasons are same the motivation and the attitude.  Therefore, the teachers should have the knowledge and respect for home dialect and they need to understand that unless children do not have desire and do not accept it they will not learn a language properly.