Scriptism and language in schools

A school has produced a list that proscribes what vocabulary pupils can use apparently from the school's concern about such vocabulary appearing in exam writing (Booth, 2021). The school, from the news report, says they don't "ban" the words in the list for "general use" or "interacting socially". Some linguists have criticised the school and further there seems to be a general criticism from some linguists that one weakness of prescriptive approaches is that:

"they conflate spoken and written forms." (EngLangBlog, 2021)

In the podcast Lexis, Episode 5, Ian Cushing notes that

"Linguistically I think those tensions seem to arise when teachers and policies conflate speech and writing...it's suggested that student's speak in full sentences". (Lexis 22:35 https://anchor.fm/lexispodcast/episodes/Ian-Cushing---E5-egjpe5)

Later he says

"...that's something where we're trying or policy is trying to take a model of written language and just very neatly map it on to the spoken language. But that's a really crude understanding of how language works and it's a very reductionist way of how language works. Speech and writing have very very different grammatical systems. So trying to implement a pedagogy where one is simply based on the other is you know we're not selling language as it actually is." (Lexis 23:26 https://anchor.fm/lexispodcast/episodes/Ian-Cushing---E5-egjpe5)

Linguistically this issue of writing being a model for speech has been described as scriptism, Florian Coulmas, as cited by Roy Harris (2000), defines scriptism as;

"the tendency of linguists to base their analyses on writing induced concepts such as phoneme, word, literal meaning and 'sentence', while at the same time subscribing to the principle of the primacy of speech for linguistic inquiry" (Harris 2000: 234)

Harris (2000) mentions that famous linguist Max Müller proposed that humans' vocal equipment have a "physiological alphabet", following the logic that since alphabets distinguish one sound from another this means such distinctions must already exist in nature.

Similarly there have been many debates about how many phonemes a particular language may have, by contrast you do not tend to get a similar debate about how many letters the same language script may have.

Furthermore studies of "phonological awareness" (ability to divide words into sub-syllabic segments) shows that it depends on familiarity with alphabetic writing. For example Chinese readers who know the pinyin system show phonological awareness more than Chinese readers who don't know the pinyin system.

So from the the point of view that scriptism has been endemic in the Western tradition we can see how understandable it is if teachers and policy do slip between speech and writing.

References

Booth, R. (2021, Sept 30) Oh my days: linguists lament slang ban in London school. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/sep/30/oh-my-days-linguists-lament-slang-ban-in-london-school

EngLangBlog. [@EngLangBlog]. (2021, Sept 30) And that's the pattern with so many of these prescriptive approaches - they conflate spoken and written forms. Why not [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/EngLangBlog/status/1443656667829346305

Harris, R. (2000). Rethinking writing. London: Athlone Press.