Lang. Soc. I, 131-142. Printed in Great Britain The effects of speech style and other attributes on teachers' attitudes toward pupils 1 C. R. SELIGMAN.2 G. R. TUCKER AND W. E. LAMBERT McGill University ABSTRACT This study examined some of the clues which teachers use to form attitudes toward students. Photographs, speech samples, drawings and compositions, obtained from Grade III boys, served as the stimulus materials. These were randomly combined and presented to student-teachers as examples of the personal characteristics and schoolwork of certain pupils. The student- teacher judges were asked to form subjective impressions of the pupils and to evaluate them on various characteristics using semantic differential scales. The results indicated that the voice and photograph cues signi- ficantly affected their judgments of the students' intelligence and personal characteristics. Perhaps too many educators believe that our schools are places where capable students can succeed regardless of their physical appearance, racial origins or social class. From personal experiences of various sorts, this belief may be questionable. At the research level, it has been shown (Beez 1968; Meichenbaum, Bower & Ross 1969; Rosenthal & Jacobson 1968) that a teacher's expectations for her pupils may actually affect the latter's performance. If a teacher's attitudes or expectations can play such a crucial role in the determination of pupils' academic success, it would seem valuable to examine some of the factors which contribute to the formation of these expectations. Certain behavioral features appear to elicit evaluative reactions clearly and consistently. Spoken language, for example, has been found to exert a major influence on a listener's impression of a speaker's personality (Brown 1969; Labov 1966; Lambert 1967; Tucker & Lambert 1969). In these studies, speech appeared to act as a conspicuous indicator of a speaker's ethnic, cultural or social class group; and it apparently evoked those stereotypes which the listener felt were appropriate to the group so represented. [1] This research was supported, in part, by grants from the Canada Council and Defence Research Board to W. E. Lambert and G. R. Tucker. We wish to thank the officials of the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal for their cooperation, and also Miss A. Creaghan of St Joseph's Teachers College for her assistance during the final phase of the study. We are grateful to Professors Dell Hymes and William Labov for their critical reading of an earlier version of this paper. [2] Now at Northwestern University.