On the role of language in “school failure”

Abstract

There are visible manifestations of “school failure” almost everywhere: Many boys drop out of school before completing their primary or secondary school year, or they score low on exams. The main participants in this process are children and adolescents from the less favored socio-economic sectors, and research has long shown that the cause of “failure” is of a social nature. However, does language play any role in this complex process of exclusion? Some quite widespread hypotheses (sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly) have been offered as an explanation. In this work such hypotheses are tested on the basis of systemic-functional linguistics (SFL). It seems that “school failure” is also conditioned by the variety of language, although this does not imply an impairment of such variety. Understanding this complex phenomenon is a first and essential step to begin to solve the problem.