Linguistics and the Teacher

Ronald Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136515422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Linguistics and the Teacher is a collection of essays by linguists on different aspects of the relationship between linguistics and education. All the contributors are united in their belief that linguistics should be a central element in the education of teachers, and argue for principled and systematic analysis in the study of the role of language in learning. The essays range from theoretical accounts of the nature of language study in teacher education to practical examples of how linguistics can help the teacher in such diverse contexts as the assessment of difficulty in textbooks, the teaching of literature, and analysing children's writing.

The book offers models for analysis, specific syllabus and course proposals, and, in a key essay, discussion of those areas relevant to language and learning upon which most linguists would agree. The collection as a whole presents teachers with all the materials they need to make informed judgements about what has hitherto been regarded as a difficult area.

1
Linguistics in teacher education

Michael Halliday

Introduction

This article reviews some issues in the language education of teachers during the past fifteen years and discusses the relationship between linguistics and education with particular reference to the training of teachers. The following main points are argued: that linguistics is not just a description of the formal features of language but is also a study of language ‘as an institution’ which can condition the way individuals see each other, both in and out of schools; that the social basis of language study (or sociolinguistics) should be a core element in the courses which linguists should work out with teacher educators; and that teachers’ fears about linguistics are groundless – because of its systematic attention to language it can help solve many practical language problems in the classroom.

I would like to talk in the area of linguistics and teacher education. I do so without apology, because we were asked at this meeting to relate what we’d been doing to the field of teacher education; and I am, after all, a linguist. I’ve been sharing the boat with teachers now for seventeen years, very amicably; seventeen years in which, in our work on the principles and practices of language education, a very great deal has happened. Educational theory has moved away from formalism and excessive structure (educational practice had already moved away from it, at least in England – though not so much in Scotland, where I started). It’s been through a period of child-centred liberalism which often took the form which I used to call benevolent inertia: the theory that, provided the teacher puts his feet up and does nothing to stop it, learning will take place by magic of its own accord. It is now searching for a new kind of structure which will, in some way, reinstate the teacher in his or her traditional dual role as a source of authority and of wisdom, but one which, this time, will be justified in terms of some prevailing theory of human learning or child development.

A lot has happened also in linguistics during this time. Linguistics has moved into, and then again out of, a period of extreme formalism; a period when it was discovered that you could talk about language as a formal system. The cost of doing this was that you had to pretend language was very different from what it really is: you had to idealize it to a fantastic degree, so that it bore very little relation to the way people actually talk and listen, or even the way they write and read. This was, historically, a resurgence of the Aristotelian tradition which has tended to dominate western linguistics, and in which linguistics is part of philosophy, and grammar is part of logic. (Philosophers of language don’t call it grammar; they call it syntax.) This kind of linguistics has little relevance to education, as Chomsky, with whose name it is associated, has always made perfectly clear.

Over the past ten years the other western tradition, that of discourse and rhetoric, and linguistics oriented towards the speaker in the community, which starts from the fact that people not only talk but they actually talk to each other, has been popping up again and struggling back into the light of day. This kind of linguistics has a relevance for education because it is all about meaning. It is concerned with meanings, implicit and explicit. When it is said that ‘linguistics’ is currently concerned primarily with language forms’, people are talking about the formal linguistics of ten years ago. If they had had the advantage as I did two months ago of spending a few weeks in California working there with linguists at different institutions, they would have found that those very linguists who, a few years ago, were trying to make rules for generating ideal sentences, are now studying what people actually say and write. They have abandoned formalism and all the barren distinctions that go with it: distinctions between competence and performance; between language and the use of language; and they’re studying discourse and meaning, and accepting language as the typically human mixture of order and chaos that it really is. Those who glibly deny that linguistics has any relevance to the teacher at the chalk-face are invited, therefore, to look a little more closely at what linguistics really is and what it does, and maybe even to try and find out what questions linguists are exploring, and what problems they are trying to solve.

Right in the centre of the picture they’ll find questions like the following (and these are only examples): how and why do children learn a mother tongue? What are the universals, the culturally specific features and the individual variables of the language development process? How do people interpret the situations in which they find themselves in such a way that they can effectively exchange meanings in those situations? How do people construct a model of reality, a picture of the world, through language, and what is it about the nature of language that enables them to do so? How is language related to social structure? What part does it play in transmitting, maintaining and modifying that structure? How do people agree on what is sense and what is nonsense, on what is literature, on what is good literature? and so on.

It would be hard to find questions more central to education than these, and in order to pursue them, we have to investigate language in all its aspects. At the heart of language are its semantic, lexicogrammatical and phonological systems; or what we call in everyday parlance the meanings, the wordings and the sounds. This is where grammar comes in. Language teachers – and I mean by that all teachers concerned with language education – ought to know something about grammar; though in my view, functional grammar is more useful than formal grammar for our purposes. (One of the objections to traditional grammar is that it is formal, not functional; another is that it is not very good formal grammar.) This is not, of course, so that they can teach grammar in the classroom. I was sceptical about the value of classroom grammar seventeen years ago, and nothing that has happened since has led me to change my mind. (I leave aside, however, the question of grammar in the upper two years or so of secondary school; there may be a place for it there, but that’s a different question.) The purpose is so that they, as teachers, will understand about language and how it works. But even in linguistics, in the context of teacher education, it seems to me that grammar will play only a fairly minor part. For one thing I would consider semantics more important (although it should be said that functional grammar is, in any case, a semantic kind of grammar). I would put in, I think, just as much functional grammar as is necessary for the understanding of semantics and for explaining the meaning of a text – you need this, apart from anything else, for the appreciation of poetry. You can’t really explain why a poem or any other piece of literature makes the impact it does without some grammar behind you. Grammar helps to overcome the purely private nature of literature as a school subject, where the pupil is simply left guessing as to what reaction to a particular work the teacher expects of him – an approach that may be derived from I.A. Richards’s dogma that the meaning of a poem is between the lines. (A very slight but significant slip there – if he’d only said the meaning of a poem is behind the lines I would have said ‘hear, hear’.)

I would want some basic phonetics and phonology in teacher education; about intonation, rhythm, prosodies and airstream mechanisms. A bit of segmental phonology concerned with phonemes, is, perhaps, also likely to be useful, especially in teaching English as a second language. In addition I would want something on language development in children, and on the relation between language development and cognitive development. (I needn’t expand on this because it’s a major theme for this whole conference.) Then I would want a deep study of language variation and varieties: dialects and registers, language types, language universals, and language variables; again with a special eye to the needs of those concerned with migrant and Aboriginal education. And then I would want a study of institutional linguistics -bilingualism and multilingualism, language development (in the other sense of nations and communities), and language planning. Finally I would want to explore the whole question of the place of language in the life of institutions, and in the value systems of the community: how language expresses ideologies and creates a culture as a complex of semiotic or meaning systems.

All this is linguistics. I don’t know whether it’s just linguistics, or sociolinguistics, or some other kind of hyphenated linguistics; it’s simply the study of language, and I don’t think we need be too concerned with where we draw these particular boundaries. In other words, I would like to reject categorically the assertion that a course of general linguistics is of no particular use to teachers. I think it’s fundamental. But I don’t think it should be a sort of watered down academic linguistics course. It should be something new, designed and worked out by linguists and teachers and teacher trainers working together.

But the place of linguistics in teacher education is not simply, in my view, its contribution to the teacher’s professional expertise – that is one aspect of it. In this respect it resembles psychology and sociology; it is not something to teach, but something to enhance a teacher’s understanding of the processes of learning and the content of what is being learned. A very simple example can be given from what has just been said: that, without some linguistics, you can’t understand the regularities of the English spelling system. If this was all there was to linguistics perhaps people wouldn’t be so scared of it. The strength of the reactions that the mention of linguistics used to provoke, and still does provoke in some quarters, suggests that a lot of people feel threatened by it; and if that is so, we need to understand why. Partly, no doubt, in the same way that I always felt threatened by philosophy and philosophers. A philosopher colleague once said to me that I’d been ‘doing philosophy’ all the time in my own work – I just hadn’t been doing it very well; it was a do-it-yourself philosophy of a not very effective kind. I think the reason teachers feel threatened by linguistics is partly that they know they’re ‘doing’ it all the time in their work, and yet doing it not very well. But there is also, perhaps, another reason: there is a real sense in which linguistics is threatening; it’s uncomfortable, and it’s subversive. It’s uncomfortable because it strips us of the fortifications that protect and surround some of our deepest prejudices. As long as we keep linguistics at bay we can go on believing what we want to believe about language, both our own and everybody else’s. We can go on believing that there must be something wrong with the mental abilities and thought processes of all those children who speak non-standard English, or are foreigners, or are Aboriginal speakers, or whatever else. We can go on believing that language criticism is a meaningful exercise; that notions such as that certain vowel sounds are inherently ugly, or certain modes of expression and grammatical patterns are inelegant and impoverished, are genuine opinions and feelings that we have arrived at for ourselves instead of being what they are, simply the received attitudes and slogans that we get from our culture and our sub-culture. Linguistics destroys these comforting illusions, forcing us to distinguish what are simply regular features of this or that language or dialect, on the one hand, from what are true failures of language where the meaning has been distorted or obscured.

But there’s more to it than that. Linguistics is not only uncomfortable, it’s also subversive, in that once we come to look at language as an institution – that is, at the relation between a language and the people who speak it – then we come face to face with what are often unpleasant and unpalatable truths about society. More than any other human phenomenon, language reflects and reveals the inequalities that are enshrined in the social process. When we study language systematically (and that is all that linguistics is), we see into the power structure that lies behind our everyday social relationships, the hierarchical statuses that are accorded to different groups within society – social classes, ethnic groups, the generations, the sexes, urban and rural populations, or whatever they may be; and it’s not surprising that these structures are revealed by language, because they are maintained by language, both actively and symbolically. This is why people defend their language when it is under attack and try to maintain it in an alien environment. This is why migrants coming to Australia want to go on speaking their own language: not simply as an echo of the cultural past, but because it defines and protects their identity in the present and the future.

More than any other subject, linguistics forces us to face and acknowledge the multi-cultural nature of society and to do something about it. This can be a deeply disturbing experience, bringing to consciousness what is usually below the level of awareness both in our individual mental processes and in our forms of social behaviour and interaction. But for the same reasons that linguistics is threatening and disturbing, it can also be immensely rewarding. These then are some of the reasons why I believe that linguistics is not irrelevant to education.

Not everything that a linguist inquires into is equally part of the picture. Linguists are interested in interpreting language from all kinds of different standpoints, and some of the questions that they ask are asked out of pure curiosity, just from the desire to understand. Therefore we should beware of thinking that every subject exists simply to serve the needs of education. There is a tendency for educators to demand an immediate pay-off: if we can’t apply these ideas directly here and now in our teaching, then we don’t want anything to do with them. This attitude passes for a healthy pragmatism: we’re practical people with a job to do, no time for the frills. In fact it is simply mental laziness – a refusal to inquire into things that may not have any immediate and obvious applications, but which for this very reason may have a deeper significance in the long run. Most of linguistics is not classroom stuff; but it is there behind the lines, underlying our classroom practices, and our ideas about children, and about learning and reality.

Note

This paper first originated in a talk given at a conference organized by Canberra Curriculum Development Centre as part of its National Language Development Project in Australia. The paper appeared in J. Maling-Keepes and B.D. Keepes (eds), Language and Education: The LDP Phase 1, Canberra, Curriculum Development Centre, 1979, and is reprinted here by kind permission of the Director of the Language Development Project.

2
Linguistics and the teacher

John Sinclair

Introduction

This article stresses the need for the implementation of recommendations made in the Bullock Report for teachers to receive a rigorous and linguistically systematic course(s) in language and learning, and does so in the light of some reasons why such courses have generally failed to materialize. The dangers of such a failure are very effectively highlighted by a mordant analogy with the professional training of doctors. The article is usefully supplemented by an appendix in which Professor Sinclair outlines, with reference to criteria established in the main body of the paper, the kirid of content he thinks appropriate to linguistics in education courses.

The matter of expertise in English language as part of the professional training of teachers has led to a recurrent debate. Some movement can be observed in practice, not all in what I consider to be the right direction. This paper is a revision of a contribution to the debate some years ago, and I am glad to say that fairly extensive revision is necessary. Since 1975 we have had the Bullock Report (DES, 1975), well received but not well implemented, indeed stymied by the decline in provision of teacher education and the disbanding of the Area Training Organizations. Serious work in English language, not firmly enough established in the preceding four years, fell an easy prey to arguments about austerity, and the new autonomy of those former Colleges of Education that remain open weakened the external pressure to maintain and build up courses in English linguistics. Since 1976 too, we have seen the establishment of NCLE, the National Council for Languages in Education, which, in the five years of its existence, has begun to provide a useful centre for identifying important issues in the profession as a whole, and co-ordinating development. Although numerically heavily weighted in favour of teachers of western European languages, it is conscious of a need to broaden its base and get all the branches of language teaching to work together. From the learner’s point of view – for example a child at secondary school – the language teachers speak with many voices, impose widely different methods, have different priorities and objectives, assess in a variety of ways. Because of the language situation in the UK, some variety is desirable and inevitable, but at present we have unplanned and often needless variety in approaches, and too little recognition of differences that really matter, like the different language backgrounds of the pupils.

This paper pursues the claim that knowledge of the structures and functions of language is essential in the professional education of a teacher. All teachers should be given access to a basic understanding of language in the classroom. Language teachers have to control a more complex discourse, and therefore need more detailed study of the processes of education through language. English teachers, whose subject is central in the educational system, require a comprehensive appreciation of the role of language in both institutionalized learning and personal development.

It must be recognized straight away that this view is not attractive to many who claim to speak on behalf of the silent majority of teachers. I shall call them the mediators. In the 1950s, they or their predecessors were downright hostile to the growing discipline of linguistics; as the climate of opinion gradually moved, and some approving gestures were necessary, the mediators became ready to admit some watered-down ‘language study’ into educational courses, while trying to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Linguistics in teacher education
• 2. Linguistics and the teacher
• 3. Linguistics for education
• 4. Do linguists have anything to say to teachers?
• 5. The spoken language
• 6. Responding to children’s writing
• 7. The assessment of linguistic difficulty in reading material
• 8. The language demands of school learning
• 9. What is English? – Modern English language in the curriculum
• 10. Sociolinguistics and the integrated English lesson
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index