Introduction
In this chapter I provide theoretical, professional, and I hope moral justifications for the value of linguistics to the secondary English teacher. By linguistics, I mean an awareness of how language works in terms of its structures, systems and uses across a range of communicative practices and products. By value, I mean the extent to which this awareness is deemed to be an important part of the curriculum as part of a broadly integrated notion of English on an equal footing with the study of Shakespeare, or nineteenth-century novels, or the media and so on. But, I also want to argue that knowledge about linguistics is important and valuable for the teacher as an educator, regardless of the academic field within which he or she works, as a way of understanding the ways that people and ideas about them are represented through language and other meaning-making resources. I argue that a teacher can be a kind of applied linguist, responsible for promoting a more inclusive educational environment that utilises the considerable language resources that students themselves have. In this chapter, I therefore promote both a broad and functional view of linguistics, beyond some of the narrow working parameters that have typified discourses about language study over the last one hundred years, particularly those that have explored value simply in terms of a teacher being able to improve studentsā grammatical knowledge.
This chapter begins by providing a brief sketch of the origin, nature and identity of curriculum English and the historical privileging of āliteratureā over ālanguageā, offering some comment on the debates that have surrounded language work in schools, and highlighting its largely undervalued status. Then, drawing on a text that appeared as part of a story on language use in schools in the UK press, I suggest two important ways that linguistics can be valuable to the teacher. First (and as the chapters in Part 2 of this book show), I demonstrate how a teacher can use linguistic knowledge as a powerful tool for facilitating meaningful and genuinely insightful descriptive language work in the classroom. Second, and drawing on James Paul Geeās work in the area of social and cultural approaches to language and literacy, I argue that a teacher is an applied linguist in a much broader sense by drawing attention to how a linguistically informed teacher might use linguistics to make more readily available implicit values and representations of individuals and groups. I end with a note of caution but also with a firm call for optimism in briefly considering both some external and internal barriers to improving teachersā knowledge.
Linguistics, language and schools: a brief sketch
The subordinate status of language study in schools and at the heart of the English curriculum has a long history dating back to the nineteenth century where the teaching of English literature was viewed as a mechanism for civilising the working classes, providing a strong sense of moral purpose, and for both building and upholding society values (Poulson 1998). In the early part of the twentieth century, there were two major movements that helped to strengthen the position of English literature as English teaching per se. The first was the 1921 Newbolt Report (Board of Education 1921) which, following the First World War, sought to re-establish a national identity by promoting the importance of national literature as a vehicle for teaching universal truths and acceptable ways of looking at the world. Although the report authors also emphasised that all students should have explicit teaching in their mother tongue, I have argued elsewhere (Giovanelli 2014: 10ā11) that this second sentiment largely amounted to a narrow deficit and prescriptive view of language study that aimed to draw attention to right and wrong ways of speaking and writing. Effectively, the study of high-quality literature to support teachers was emphasised as socially and morally valuable, whereas language work was seen merely as utilitarian and instructive.
The second movement grew naturally from the ethos of The Newbolt Report and gave a shape to literature as a school discipline and to the literature-as-English paradigm. This influence is most evident in the epistemologies advanced by F. R. Leavis (1932, 1979) and his students whose thinking prescribed a certain kind of literature study (only certain authors were considered as being part of the canon) through the practice of close and systematic criticism. This Leavisite view of literary criticism as a powerful civilising and stabilising force revolutionised English teaching in higher education as well as in schools (see Hilliard 2012 for a detailed discussion). Consequently, the study of literature was viewed for many years as the exclusive cornerstone of the English curriculum (Thompson 1969, 1975). In contrast, philology, which had been the primary focus of language work at the turn of the century all but disappeared in the face of fervent support for literature teaching. Where grammar teaching did remain, it was largely centred on teaching children to label parts of invented and decontextualised sentences; unsurprisingly a body of research found that this had very little benefit (Macauley 1947; Cawley 1958; Harris 1962). Together with the lack of real interest at the interface of linguistics and education up until the early 1960s (Hudson and Walmsley 2005), this meant that language work in schools was marginalised and any consequent notion of value in linguistic knowledge for the teacher was downplayed to the point that it was seen as negligible, if worth anything at all.
However, in the mid-seventies, another influential government report, A Language for Life (DES 1975), demonstrated how much had changed in the perceived value of linguistically informed work since the middle of the century (Burgess and Hardcastle 2013: 5). Known as āThe Bullock Reportā, after the chair of the committee that produced it, its main recommendations included the requirement for schools to have a policy for language across the curriculum, the inclusion of knowledge about language in education as a part of initial teacher training, and the establishing of a national centre for language and education (DfE 1975: 515). The Bullock Report explicitly attaches value to language work in much broader terms than simply the knowledge of grammatical terminology. Indeed a different kind of āEnglishā, driven by educationalists with backgrounds in the psychology and sociology of education and centred on the role of language as an important tool for learning the development of the individual in the classroom (see for example Britton 1970), had been gathering momentum since the early to mid 1960s. In turn, an important government-funded programme, Schools Council Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching, led by Michael Halliday had run from 1964ā71 and had foregrounded the value of students being able to explore their own language in their own terms. This programme attached great importance to teachersā own confidence in, and knowledge of, language both as a system and as a pedagogical tool in the classroom (Halliday 1967). The programme, arguably the most important development in language education work in English schools, produced substantial teaching materials for primary and secondary levels (see McKay et al. 1970; Doughty et al. 1971), and influenced a later series of books aimed at teachers and teacher educators which explored aspects of language work in classroom contexts. These included volumes on childrenās language in school (Thornton 1974) and outside it (Rogers 1976), accents and dialect (Trudgill 1975), language varieties in schools (Richmond 1982) and the language of literature (Carter and Burton 1982). A further important movement, the National Congress on Languages in Education (NCLE), was established in the mid seventies to promote a coherent approach to language work through language awareness, a term that encompassed the exploration of language across subjects and varieties, including learning of and about languages other than English (Donmall-Hicks 1997; and see also Hawkins 1984).
The later Kingman Report (DES 1988) positioned a language pedagogical framework around discrete levels of language analysis, modes and genres, language development, and historical and geographical variation. It also provided the impetus for the Language in the National Curriculum (LINC) project, which began in September 1989 and involved the production of teaching materials and dissemination of these together with specific training across regional centres (see Carter 1990; Bain et al. 1992). However, the materials were pulled just as they were about to be made available for teachers on the basis that they were not suitable for use with children in the classroom. Despite being funded by the government, the right-wing press and ministers believed that the materials promoted exactly the kind of inquiry-led and descriptive approach to language study that compromised their desire to make such work more prescriptive and geared towards standards and notions of correctness (see Sealey 1994 for a discussion of the press coverage of the project and its suppression). Even if LINC was not valued by the government that had commissioned it, its legacy was to enthuse teachers with the possibility of genuinely engaging language work in their classrooms, and it can be no surprise that the unofficial dissemination of the materials among networks of teachers coincided with the rapid growth of A-level English Language throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
More recently of course, the value attached to language work in schools and consequently the expectations and demands on teachersā linguistic knowledge have been, in functional and utilitarian terms, evident in the content and pedagogies promoted by the primary literacy and secondary national strategies (Clark 2010). Equally, the latest round of GCSE reform (for teaching from September 2015) has seen the removal of spoken language study from examination specifications, a move which is all the more surprising given that it had been a fairly new addition (from 2010 specifications). This kind of work had provided a welcome opportunity for students to explore discourse strategies, interaction, registers, contexts and the influence of new technologies on communicative practices in ways which gave a valuable introduction to AS and A-level study. For those not moving into the Sixth Form, it at least meant that all students were required to complete some descriptive language work. It could be argued that despite a renewed focus on grammar at Key Stage 2, the latest reforms at Key Stages 3 and 4 fail to provide a coherent pathway from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 5 work, and may also mean that many students will not do any meaningful language-based study across their five years in secondary school.
