TY - JOUR
T1 - The (white) ears of Ofsted: a raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate
AU - CUSHING, IAN
AU - Snell, Julia
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press.
PY - 2023/6/18
Y1 - 2023/6/18
N2 - England has had a schools inspectorate since 1839, first in the form of Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI), and since 1992, in the form of the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted). The inspectorate, a workforce made up of a majority of white inspectors, conduct regular inspections of all state schools in England, producing reports which comment on various aspects of educational provision, including teachers’ and students’ spoken language. In this article we deploy a raciolinguistic genealogy to examine the listening practices of the inspectorate, drawing on historical inspection reports generated from archival work, inspectorate language policy, and a large corpus of contemporary reports. We show how raciolinguistic ideologies are deeply embedded into the sociopolitical culture of the inspectorate, and how these ideologies translate into systems of sonic surveillance in which the nonstandardised language practices of students and teachers are heard as impoverished, deficient, and unsuitable for school. (Raciolinguistics, schools, language policing, standardised English, Ofsted, England, social class, ideology)
AB - England has had a schools inspectorate since 1839, first in the form of Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI), and since 1992, in the form of the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted). The inspectorate, a workforce made up of a majority of white inspectors, conduct regular inspections of all state schools in England, producing reports which comment on various aspects of educational provision, including teachers’ and students’ spoken language. In this article we deploy a raciolinguistic genealogy to examine the listening practices of the inspectorate, drawing on historical inspection reports generated from archival work, inspectorate language policy, and a large corpus of contemporary reports. We show how raciolinguistic ideologies are deeply embedded into the sociopolitical culture of the inspectorate, and how these ideologies translate into systems of sonic surveillance in which the nonstandardised language practices of students and teachers are heard as impoverished, deficient, and unsuitable for school. (Raciolinguistics, schools, language policing, standardised English, Ofsted, England, social class, ideology)
KW - raciolinguistics
KW - schools
KW - language policing
KW - standardised English
KW - Ofsted
KW - England
KW - ideology
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U2 - 10.1017/S0047404522000094
DO - 10.1017/S0047404522000094
M3 - Article (journal)
SN - 0047-4045
VL - 52
SP - 363
EP - 386
JO - Language in Society
JF - Language in Society
IS - 3
ER -