Change Empower Include

Strong spoken and written literacies are the basic pillars of academic success and socio-economic welfare. This project aims to address the regional, social and gender inequalities that are often sustained in the English language classroom when a blanket approach to language teaching is assumed. More specifically, it targets two main educational ‘gaps’ that our previous work and Local Education Improvement Plans highlight as problematic in the Liverpool City Region.

First, the lack of curricular recommendations on how to teach spoken language and specifically varieties of English. Our oracy research (see the links below) highlight that this lack of guidance together with the strong focus of the curriculum on Standard English is detrimental to students who are users of regional dialects, as dialect is strongly connected with regional identity. Additionally, lack of confidence in speaking in the classroom prevents students from developing aspirations, including the pursuit of further education and careers associated with oracy practices that the school cannot equip them with.

Second, the prevalence of gender-gap ideologies in the teaching of writing at the primary level (boys’ perceived under-attainment in writing). Results from our underpinning research in writing show that the differences in writing between the genders are limited and, importantly, indicate that gendered views of children’s writing have an impact on children’s (boys’) motivation for and socio-emotional responses to writing, fostering a significant gender-based imbalance on a key literacy skill (writing).

This project aims to counteract these educational inequalities at grassroots level through participatory research and collaborative work with primary and secondary schools in Merseyside. Together with local teachers, we have created a series of teaching materials that target the above-mentioned social, gender and regional inequalities in the Liverpool classroom. The materials are available from this site and aim to make this teacher-led toolkit relevant and reusable for the wider UK teaching community where similar inequalities are observed. These resources aim to be a systematic solution to the dialect-bias and gender-gap problems presented above.

Current Research