Teaching Social Register and Code Switching in the Classroom

Abstract

Children in poverty have been shown to master only the informal registers of the English language (Payne 1996 Payne, R. 1996. A framework for understanding poverty, Highlands, Texas: AHA Publications. [Google Scholar]). Unable to understand the formal register used in schools and on standardized tests, students in poverty achieve at a lower rate in school (Hodgkinson 1995 Hodgkinson, H. L. 1995. What should we call people?: Race, class and the census of 2000. Phi Delta Kappa, 77(2): 173–79. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and choose inappropriate behaviors as a result of misunderstandings that are attributed to the inability to understand the language used in the formal register (Payne 1996 Payne, R. 1996. A framework for understanding poverty, Highlands, Texas: AHA Publications. [Google Scholar]). A school in Cincinnati, Ohio is teaching the skills necessary for these children to translate, understand, and use other registers and codes of the English language. This article describes this curriculum and suggests that this method assists young children in poverty to learn the language of formal register and consequently experience greater academic and affective success in school.