Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Foreword: The challenge for education
- Introduction
- Part I Linguistics from the top down: encouraging institutional change
- Introduction to Part I
- 1 Ideologies of language, art, and science
- 2 Bringing linguistics into the school curriculum: not one less
- 3 How linguistics has influenced schools in England
- 4 Supporting the teaching of knowledge about language in Scottish schools
- 5 Envisioning linguistics in secondary education: an Australian exemplar
- 6 Linguistics and educational standards: the California experience
- 7 Developing sociolinguistic curricula that help teachers meet standards
- 8 Linguistic development in children's writing: changing classroom pedagogies
- Part II Linguistics from the bottom up: encouraging classroom change
- Part III Vignettes: voices from the classroom
- References
- Index
3 - How linguistics has influenced schools in England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Foreword: The challenge for education
- Introduction
- Part I Linguistics from the top down: encouraging institutional change
- Introduction to Part I
- 1 Ideologies of language, art, and science
- 2 Bringing linguistics into the school curriculum: not one less
- 3 How linguistics has influenced schools in England
- 4 Supporting the teaching of knowledge about language in Scottish schools
- 5 Envisioning linguistics in secondary education: an Australian exemplar
- 6 Linguistics and educational standards: the California experience
- 7 Developing sociolinguistic curricula that help teachers meet standards
- 8 Linguistic development in children's writing: changing classroom pedagogies
- Part II Linguistics from the bottom up: encouraging classroom change
- Part III Vignettes: voices from the classroom
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Can linguistics influence school-level education? Indeed, should it do so? Linguists are divided on the second question, but I believe that education needs us (Hudson 2004). But even if it is desirable for our research to influence education, is this possible in the real world, and especially in the real world of English-speaking countries? After all, there is a history in these countries of silly ideas about language teaching which any linguist could refute – most obviously prescriptive ideas about good and bad grammar. Could there be some inherent and deep-seated incompatibility between research-based ideas from linguistics and school-level policy on language education?
This chapter is a description of a number of fairly recent changes in the education system of England – Wales and Scotland are somewhat different, though both have undergone similar changes. All these changes can be traced directly to the influence of linguistics, and they are all supported both by bottom-up grassroots enthusiasm among teachers and also by top-down official legislation. The most strikingly successful example is the A-level course in English Language, which I describe in the following section, but there are others which I also outline. The intervening section sketches the historical background to these changes, so this is where I provide most of my evidence for the influence of linguistics. In a nutshell, I argue that an extreme reaction against arid grammar-teaching in the 1960s and 1970s produced a language-teaching vacuum which linguistics has filled.
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- Linguistics at SchoolLanguage Awareness in Primary and Secondary Education, pp. 35 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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