The transformation of teacher expectations into student academic performance works through four factors, as Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jakobson explain in their classic book Pygmalion in the Classroom:

1. Climate: Teachers are nicer to students of who they have high expectations and create a warmer climate for them.
2. Input: Teachers teach more material to students of who they have high expectations.
3. Response opportunity: Teachers provide more response opportunities to students of who they have high expectations and help them shape the answer.
4. Feedback: Teachers praise students of who they have high expectations more and provide them with more detailed and constructive feedback when they get their answer wrong.

In the original study of the Pygmalion effect by Rosenthal and Jakobson a positive expectation was created in teachers by telling them at the beginning of the schoolyear that five randomly selected children in their class had done extraordinarily well on a predictive test of academic aptitude and could therefore be expected to become “late bloomers” over the course of the year. It turned out that, within the school year, these five randomly selected kids achieved the greatest gains in academic performance in the class. Obvious evidence for a Pygmalion effect!

Ethical experimental research designs to investigate the Golem effect are much more difficult to come up with (Babad, Inbar and Rosenthal circumvented the ethical problem by studying teacher trainees who made a one-off assessment that had no consequence whatsoever for the way other teachers assessed the student or the way the students’ overall performance was assessed).

Beyond artificially inducing high or low expectations of academic talent, the implications of the Pygmalion and Golem effects in diverse schools are clear for students from backgrounds about whom group stereotypes exist: if there is a widespread belief in a society that the children of rich parents have higher academic potential than the children of poor parents, many teachers will share those beliefs; and, by treating the children of rich and poor parents differently, they will contribute to the self-fulfilling prophecy that actually turns the belief into a reality. The same will be true of children from different ethnic backgrounds.

While the relationship between teacher expectations and student socio-economic background and student ethnicity has received considerable attention, this is not true of student bilingualism.

A Belgian study recently published in the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Pulinx et al. 2015) raises precisely this question: how are teacher attitudes towards linguistic diversity related to the expectations they hold of their students? While the study does not actually go on to examine a link between teacher expectations and student performance, the results of the study are not pretty: The researchers found that three-quarters of all the 674 teachers in their study held strong monolingual beliefs. This means that the teachers believed that there was no place for languages other than Dutch in schools in Flanders. For bilingual students this means that their teachers saw no role or value for their home languages.

Pulinx et al. 2015, p. 8

Not only did a majority of teachers hold strong monolingual beliefs; those who held monolingual beliefs were also more likely to have low expectations of the academic performance of their bilingual students:

There was an association between the monolingual beliefs of teachers and the level of trust they have in their pupils: the stronger the monolingual beliefs are, the less trust teachers have in their pupils. (Pulinx et al. 2015, pp. 11-2)

This quantitative study does not go on to link teacher’s monolingual beliefs and the low expectations they have of their bilingual students’ academic performance to the actual academic performance of their students nor to any of the other numerous factors known to constitute educational disadvantage. However, the researchers raise an important point for a future research agenda: how do teacher’s expectations of linguistically diverse students shape the learning experiences and academic trajectories of those students?

References

Babad, E., Inbar, J., & Rosenthal, R. (1982). Pygmalion, Galatea, and the Golem: Investigations of biased and unbiased teachers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74 (4), 459-474 DOI: 10.1037/0022-0663.74.4.459

Pulinx, R., Van Avermaet, P., & Agirdag, O. (2015). Silencing linguistic diversity: the extent, the determinants and consequences of the monolingual beliefs of Flemish teachers International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-15 DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2015.1102860

Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the Classroom. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Each time I visit France and have breakfast there, I am reminded of Goethe. In his 1792 essay “Campagne in Frankreich” he offered this spot-on description of the difference between Germans and their neighbors to the West: “White bread and black bread form the shibboleth, the war cry that distinguishes the Germans and the French.”

Shibboleth is a Hebrew word. The tanakh (Sefer Shoftim; Book of Judges 12:5-6) describes it as a military code word in the war of the Gileadites against the Ephraimites. 42,000 Ephraimite refugees were massacred at a ford in the Jordan river because they mispronounced “shibboleth” (which means “ear of corn” and, in this context, also “body of water”) as “sibboleth.” To be historically accurate, despite the spelling sh-b-l-t, the Gileadites pronounced the initial sound as a voiceless dental fricative, like th in English, and the Ephramaites replaced it with an s-sound.

Fatal mispronunciations have been reported in other wars, too. During the War of the Sicilian Vespers, 2,000 French occupiers were killed in Palermo in 1281. They were identified because they couldn’t pronounce the c-sound ceci (“chick-peas”) and chichi (“beans”) in the Italian way.

During World War II, Dutch resistance fighters used the pronunciation of the city of Scheveningen to distinguish between friend and foe. Germans failed to pronounce the city name as s-cheveningen and used an intial sh instead. And during the Finnish-Soviet Winter War of 1939/40, the Finnish code word was Karjala (“Karelia”), which Russian soldiers would mispronounce as “Karelija.”

Marion Tauschwitz reports a particularly gruesome shibboleth in her biography of Hilde Domin. Like many other German-Jewish refugees, the poet Hilde Domin found refuge in the Dominican Republic in 1940. The dictator Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic at the time, thought that European-Jewish refugees provided him with an opportunity to “whiten” his people a bit. While he welcomed European immigrants, he used drastic means to keep Haitian immigrants out. The Dominican Republic shares borders with French-speaking Haiti and Haitians have always tried to move to the more prosperous Dominican Republic. Unfortunately, Trujillo considered them as too dark-skinned in contrast to the more lightly-skinned population of the Dominican Republic, and so the stage was set for the Parsley Massacre. In 1937, 20,000 Haitians residing in border areas were massacred if they failed to pronounce the Spanish word for “parsley”, perejil, with a rolled r. The typical French substitution of l instead of r made them easy targets.

On the positive side, there are harmless shibboleths, too. Non-native speakers of German rarely manage to pronounce Streichholzschächtelchen (“match box”) correctly and those who can’t do the Swiss German Chuchichäschtli (“kitchen cabinet”) are easily identified as German Germans. Northern Germans in Bavaria are stuck when it comes to Oachkatzlschwoaf (“squirrel tail”) and Bavarians falter at the Low German equivalent, Eekkattensteert. Finally, Non-Jews who want to wish their Jewish friends “Happy Hanukkah” should make sure to stress the first syllable. Stressing the second syllable might lead to the conclusion that the well-wisher only has a superficial knowledge of Judaism.

Christoph Gutknecht is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at Hamburg University and the author of numerous popular books about language in German.