Abstract
This chapter is largely based on data generated from time spent in a London secondary school, in which I observed lessons, spoke with teachers and collected de jure and de facto language policy artefacts. I developed a theory of panlinguistic surveillance by examining how the body, gesture and various semiotic resources get policed alongside language in schools, showing how discourses of discipline intermingle with language ideologies, which co-construct ‘bad behaviour’, ‘bad bodies’ and ‘bad language’. This, I argue, is especially the case within policies rooted in deficit perspectives about language which are marketed under guises of scientific objectivity and social justice. I show how many of these policies, which run central to post-2010 language education reforms in England, are imports from north America, which themselves have roots in methods of urban policing and the punitive treatment of low-income, racialised speakers.
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Notes
- 1.
In April 2021, the DfE released a video showing the then principal of Bedford Free School and CEO of Advantage Schools, Stuart Lock, talking about their corporeal discipline policy built on ‘sweating the small stuff’, which included the banning of speech in corridors and using standardised English at all times. See also Whitman (2008).
- 2.
I obtained the demographics of the surveyed teachers via an FOI request (OUP, 2018b). Teachers were asked about the age range they teach, their job title and the subject they teach, but not about their race and ethnicity. The statistics for the report also show that students classified as being eligible for Free School Meals in the surveyed teachers’ schools were above the national average. The report also includes the exact survey questions, all of which are closed and assume the existence of a word gap—for example, ‘Roughly what percentage (%) of pupils in the following year groups would you classify as having a limited vocabulary to the extent that it impacts on their learning?’ The 2018 report was followed by another two in the following years (see Cushing, 2022a for an extended critique).
- 3.
A third edition of TLAC was published in 2021, but here I base my discussion on the second edition, given that this was the edition used by NUA. In the third edition, Lemov appears to respond to criticisms of his deficit stances on language (e.g. Cushing, 2021) but fails to cite any of these or engage with them in any great detail. He also continues to confuse written and spoken standardised English—for whilst the critiques of TLAC have been aimed at his stance on spoken language, in the third edition, he writes ‘Several found my argument oppressive or offensive. For what it’s worth, they were all written in impeccable Standard English’ (Lemov, 2021: 185).
- 4.
A card used by referees in various sports to formally notify a player of a rule violation. The card that Emily refers to did not exist as a physical object but was an imaginary one held up by management and other teachers, whilst the ‘rule-breaker’ was instructed to correct their ‘error’. When I did see this happen, it was always with some self-awareness of how dramatic it was and would cause embarrassment on all sides. But the fact is that it still happened and contributed to a general culture of sonic surveillance throughout the school.
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Cushing, I. (2022). Bad Behaviour, Bad Bodies, Bad Language. In: Standards, Stigma, Surveillance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17891-7_6
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