Also, the work of A. D. Edwards
(1976) among 11-year-old middle- and working-class children suggests that
"large and consistent speech differences" (p. 108) may not always exist. At
the very least, such work indicates how important the context is in any
speech study (see also Labov, 1973). Educators must appreciate that
children's language behaviour in the classroom is largely determined by
their definitions of that context (see Bradac, 1982; Ryan and Giles, 1982;
Smith, Giles and Hewstone, 1972) and that these situational construals may
be quite different depending upon the ethnic and class background of the
children concerned.