Language Attitudes and the Achievement of Bilingual Pupils. Research and Development Memorandum No. 146

This study measured pupil and teacher attitudes toward language variation in a bilingual Spanish/English environment; attempted to determine whether teacher attitudes could be changed in workshops dealing with sociolinguistic concepts of speech variation; and attempted to determine whether teacher and pupil attitudes have a relation to pupil achievement in language arts. The subjects were 279 fourth- and fifth-grade pupils and 18 teachers. A matched guise technique was used to measure both pupils' and teachers' attitudes. Pupil achievement was measured by a relative gain score in reading; reading and English grades; and performance on oral proficiency tests. In general teachers and pupils rated standard English higher than other speech varieties, and attitudes were not changed in the workshops. Pupil evaluation of standard English over other varieties was positively related to pupil achievement on some measures. Teacher attitudes toward code-switching seemed to have a negative relation to their pupils' relative gains in reading as measured by objective tests and English grades assigned by the teachers. (Author/AM)