The Schooling Process and Awareness of the Standard: Examples from Dialect Phonetics

• Autores: Isabel Almeida, Cristina Martins
• Localización: Language awareness, ISSN 0965-8416, Vol. 11, Nº. 4, 2002, págs. 229-239
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Linguistic diversity is an essential characteristic of speech communities. However, at the same time as one observes diversity, different mechanisms of linguistic unification are also active, emphasising the importance of standard varieties. The schooling system is one of these mechanisms, and, as such, the observation of how children's linguistic behaviour is affected by it is a topic of interest. In such an analysis it is useful to bear in mind that, in school, children are introduced to the written form of language. One of the most obvious dimensions of language variation is geographical. In this study we investigate, first the extent to which traditional regional characteristics persist in the linguistic repertoire of school children, and then on the manner in which dialectal features and the level of children's awareness of them interact with learning to read and write. Data from a sample of children in the first to fourth years of elementary schools (in the districts of Viseu and Coimbra, Portugal) were collected and analysed.