Eckert and Cheshire

 

In every school you will find distinct groups, Penelope Eckert identified two diverse groups in an American high school – the jocks and the burnouts. The jock were very stimulated through school activities and very eager to participate. The burnouts refused to take part in school activities and were stubborn and rebellious. In the UK, you don’t really find specific social groups like Eckert has stated in America, they are mainly just ‘friendship groups’. However, people tend to become friends through sports for example, if they’re on the same team they will tend to form a friendship, due to the team spending time together training they will develop the same language choices, this may be how they choose to speak later on in life all because of spending time with these interest groups. In Cheshire’s study she carried out an experiment involving two groups of girls, one having a positive attitude to crime and weapons however group 2 didn’t agree with any of these features and activities. She conducted a long term participant observation with these groups trying to distinguish their different language variations. These girls who had a negative attitude towards school and participated in criminal activities didn’t put any effort in how they spoke and their grammar. Yet the other group of girls were well spoken and they always had a positive attitude. This could link with friendship groups and their attitudes towards school life, you would typically see the groups who don’t really care about school to not put much effort into grammar and not to focus on language. Oppose to the students who are willing to work would concentrate on the way they spoke and would want to have good grammar and language. Overall, in general students will tend to use more colloquial and taboo language when in their friendship groups as these are the people they feel most comfortable around against being around family as would have to be more polite and formal.

 

 

 

 

 

Research task

Accents

• Accents relate only to pronunciation and intonation rather than grammar or vocabulary.
• Listeners, naturally pick up these cues about people’s ethnic, socioeconomic and geographical background.
• Research has shown that listeners can also make judgements on others’ intelligence, warmth and even height just by listening to recorded accented speech.
• Foreign accented speech is negatively evaluated by native speakers of a language.
• People who view their own group or culture as the centre of everything, and who scale and rate all other groups with reference to it, can be said to be ethnocentric.