to appear in : Bringing Linguistics into the Schools: Preparing K-12 Teachers, edited by
Kristin Denham and Anne Lobeck
Revolution in England: at last, linguistics meets school teaching.
Richard Hudson
Since about 1990, school education in England1 has become increasingly open to linguistics,
and since the late 1990s linguists have been able to make significant contributions to the
school curriculum. This is indeed a revolution when compared with the very negative
attitudes to linguistics in the preceding decades. This article tries to explain why the
revolution happened, and describes some of the ways in which linguists have been able to
help.
The relations between academic linguistics and school teaching revolve around the
question of explicit teaching about language - an issue that was hotly debated in the 1980s
under the acronym KAL (Wray, David, 1994). Is KAL an important part of education? The
answer isn't obvious. On one side of the debate are the Anarchists who think all language
development can be left to Nature; after all, all a child needs in order to acquire a first
language is experience of that language, so teaching KAL is an irrelevant waste of time. The
school's main responsibility is to provide a suitably rich experience of language. The opposite
corner is occupied by Joe Public, who isn't impressed by the linguistic abilities of school
leavers and is therefore convinced that KAL is essential - standards mean Standard English,
and that means grammar.
Linguists are in the familiar academic position of seeing some merit in both positions.
We all agree that a pre-school child's first language development doesn't need KAL, but we'd
probably also agree that school leavers aren't all brilliant writers. Another shared view (I
guess) is that although Joe Public is wrong about the link between grammar, Standard English
and writing ability, there may be some role for KAL at school. Children ought to know
1
This article focuses on the schools of England because Wales and Northern Ireland
have had a somewhat different recent history; Scotland's education system has always been
sturdily independent of the rest of the UK.
something about language for the same reason they ought to know about dinosaurs or human
bodies. Some linguists even believe that Joe Public has a point when he thinks that grammar knowing about grammar - improves writing (Hudson, Richard, 2001).
To cut a long story short, KAL finally disappeared from most schools in England at
about the time of the Beatles. The package of formal rules for spelling, punctuation and
grammar was one of the Bad Old Ways of the Bad Old Days which the bright new world
swept aside. However, at about the same time a handful of linguists in the UK started to think
hard about language education under the leadership of Michael Halliday (then at UCL in
London) (Halliday, Michael, 1964; Halliday, Michael, McIntosh, Angus, & Strevens, Peter,
1964; Halliday, Michael, 1978). This thinking planted seeds first in the UK and then in
Australia, where they slowly germinated. Like most seeds, they grew 'bottom up' and led to a
number of grassroots movements such as Language Awareness (Hawkins, Eric, 1987;
Hawkins, Eric, 1994), Oracy (Wilkinson, Andrew, 1965; Wilkinson, Andrew, 1994) and
Language Across the Curriculum (Corson, David., 1994; Marland, M, 1977), which had some
influence on teacher education.
Meanwhile Joe Public's worries about standards of writing and reading were
increasing and his favourite Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, strongly supported a return to
'basics'. For her, the basics included traditional formal grammar - the only kind of grammar
she knew about. Her instincts supported the recommendation of more direct teaching about
language which emerged from a series of inquiries and reports into the state of English
teaching (Carter, Ronald, 1994). However, the inquiry committees included academic
linguists, and their ideas about what children should be taught were much more enlightened
than Joe Public's - though it was never clear whether those at the top noticed the difference.
At any rate, the result was top-down support for explicit teaching about language - KAL. At
the same time the government had introduced much greater central control of the whole
education system, so the official line was given the force of law in the new National
Curriculum for English.2
2
The National Curriculum was first introduced for all subjects in 1988, but the
English Curriculum was revised quite considerably in 1995 and 1999.
This top-down pressure for KAL was further increased by one of the first steps taken
by the new Labour government in 1997, the trial introduction of the National Literacy
Strategy (extended to all primary schools in 1999). This is a highly focused programme for
raising reading and writing standards in primary schools (years 1 to 6); it was paired from the
start with a National Numeracy Strategy, and more recently it has fed into the English strand
of a National Strategy for years 7 to 9 in secondary school.3 The government has given this
programme very high priority both in terms of publicity and in terms of resources, so schools
have been bombarded with guidance and training materials and all serving teachers have had
a certain amount of training. Not surprisingly there has been some resistance, but by and
large the Literacy Strategy is accepted as part of primary education, and most teachers seem
to agree that its benefits outweigh its weaknesses. During the first few years after it was
introduced, literacy standards improved dramatically before stabilising at a higher level, but it
is hard to separate the effects of KAL from all the other changes that were introduced at the
same time.
These top-down and bottom-up developments have generally supported each other,
though there is some tension. The grass-roots enthusiasm for KAL provided many of the
ideas which subverted Joe Public's agenda - ideas such as respecting non-standard dialects,
accepting variation and (above all) treating language development as intellectual rather than
moral growth. And of course the top-down enthusiasm for explicit teaching directly supports
those teachers and teacher-trainers who advocate KAL. On the other hand, the bottom-up
movements always tended to favour 'softer' areas of KAL (such as animal language, sign
language and language acquisition) because the more technical areas such as grammar were
so hard (for teachers as well as for pupils); the Literacy Strategy leaves little room for soft
topics, so it has a price even for KAL enthusiasts.
Moreover, both movements share the same fundamental problem of teacher education.
Language is complicated, and you can't study it or teach it satisfactorily without coming to
grips with at least some of the technicalities - in short, with linguistics. But this technical
3
The National Literacy Strategy website is http://www.standards.dfee.gov.uk/literacy,
and the site for the National Strategy for KS3 (i.e. for secondary schools - Key Stage 3 covers
years 7 to 9) is http://www.standards.dfee.gov.uk/keystage3.
knowledge is rare to non-existent even among the civil servants responsible for the nation's
education, to say nothing of the teachers who deliver it. Worse still, those who laid the first
plans for the strategy didn't seem to be aware of their own ignorance and fell into numerous
pits which could have been avoided with some expert help; and perhaps for the same reason,
they greatly underestimated the technical gap in teachers' knowledge. However, this changed
thanks to forceful lobbying from linguists, so linguists are now in a position to have some
influence on language teaching in the classroom.
This is the institutional context for the developments that I shall describe below.
Pedagogy
The Literacy Strategy rests on a number of general pedagogical assumptions; for example, it
not only provides a mandatory list of classroom activities, but even says exactly how much
time should be spent on each. The total time is 60 minutes, so the Literacy Strategy is
executed every day, in every primary classroom, as the Literacy Hour. The following
summary of the structure for this hour gives a sense of the degree of detail specified:
$
15 minutes of reading or writing shared by the whole class,
$
15 minutes of focused teaching to the whole class about words or sentences - i.e.
phonics, spelling, vocabulary, grammar or punctuation,
$
20 minutes of guided work in groups (or independently) on reading or writing while
the teacher works with just one group,
$
10 minutes summing up with the whole class.
There is a similar amount of detail in the document which lays down the overall curriculum;
for example, this provides a list of the technical ideas and terms which should be covered in
each year through the primary school. Again some examples will help:
$
Reception year (age 4-5): grapheme, phoneme
$
Year 1: consonant, plural, sentence
$
Year 2: antonym, prefix, syllable, punctuation
$
Year 3: noun, verb, adjective, tense
$
Year 4: clause, phrase, connective, possessive apostrophe
$
Year 5: idiom, Standard English, dialect
$
Year 6: word derivation, complex sentence, passive
The document specifies about 30 technical terms to be learned each year. This degree of
central control is quite unprecedented in British education, but after an initial furore it now
seems to be generally accepted.
As a linguist I clearly can't comment on matters of pedagogy, but I do recognise that
they are vitally important in any discussion of linguistics in the classroom. However good our
ideas may be, they are (literally) useless unless they can be realised as concrete classroom
activities, and they can be totally invalidated by bad pedagogy. In general terms the Literacy
Hour has been a success because its pedagogy is good - highly structured, fast-moving and
clearly focused. It may have the negative effect of shackling really good teachers who have
even better ideas, but it certainly improves the teaching of weaker teachers.
Linguistics without pedagogy is no better than pedagogy without linguistics, so the
ideal programme for introducing linguistics to the classroom must combine good linguistics
with good pedagogy. The same is true, of course, for any subject; mathematics or geography
both need to match good content with good teaching. But the problem is especially acute in
linguistics because there are so few people who know about both. On the whole, academic
linguists - at least in English-speaking countries - have had very little interest in school
teaching, and most teachers and educationalists don't know enough linguistics to be able to
tap the best available. The situation calls for collaboration (Hudson, Richard, 2004), but to be
realistic linguists will always be in the subordinate role in any large-scale programme. The
broad outlines of the programme need to be defined by the educators, and the linguists can
contribute on technical matters. This is the case in English schools, where linguists4 have
indeed contributed, but only in a very subordinate role as the 'technicians in white coats' who
look after the technicalities. In this role, linguists seem to be welcome.
Any 'technical' contribution from linguistics clearly has to be compatible with the
prevailing philosophy of the education system. The current educational philosophy in the UK
is rather good for linguists because of a number of widely shared attitudes, which can be
found not only in official documents but also among teachers. The following paragraphs list
these attitudes.
4
The linguists who, to my knowledge, have contributed in one way or another
include: Keith Brown, Lynne Cameron, Ron Carter, David Dennison, Ray Murphy, Mike
Swan, Larry Trask, Catherine Walter and myself.
Tolerance of non-standard English. Traditional prescriptivism is not a powerful
force in the UK these days, though it drove Joe Public and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s
and still appears to be strong in the USA (Battistella, Edwin, 1999). Why prescriptivism
should have lost its force is hard to tell, but it may be at least in part because grammar
teaching died out totally, and in part because of the efforts of a number of linguists who
argued our case in popular books (Aitchison, Jean, 1981; Andersson, L & Trudgill, Peter,
1990; Crystal, David, 1984; Trudgill, Peter, 1975). As evidence for the change of attitude, the
present (1999) version of the official National Curriculum for English consistently refers to
'non-standard' usage where earlier versions referred to 'errors'.
Recognition of standard English. Conversely, everyone now accepts that school
leavers should be able to write standard English, and most people accept the government's
requirement that school leavers should also be able to speak it. When combined with the
tolerance of non-standard varieties this leads to a much more sophisticated approach to
variation than the old-fashioned good/bad dichotomy. The local dialect is no more appropriate
in an essay than standard English is in the playground. Another consequence is that if
standard and local English are different, knowing one does not give instant access to the
other, so those who don't use standard English natively may need to be taught it explicitly.
Acceptance of variation. The official position is that schools should teach children to
use a range of different language varieties. This applies not only to the standard and nonstandard varieties mentioned above, but also to different genres. This is an important idea in
the strategy because it moves teaching away from the idea of a single 'good style' towards a
multiplicity of styles, each appropriate to a different purpose - narrative, description, analysis,
persuasion and so on. It means that children should learn to write effectively in a range of
different genres, which in turn means reading and studying a similar range in order to pick up
their characteristics.
Language as a repertoire of tools. This is perhaps the most general idea of all. It
stresses the Hallidayan idea that language is a resource which needs to be expanded by
learning new items of vocabulary and grammar and new uses of familiar items; every item is
a tool for achieving some purpose, so the more tools you have, the more you can achieve.
When children enter school their resources are limited, and one of the school's goals is to
expand them greatly. For instance, although vocabulary size is hard to measure, research
suggests that a typical pre-school child's 4,000 words (Tomasello, Michael & Bates,
Elizabeth, 2001) may grow to an educated adult's 50,000 (Aitchison, Jean., 1994):7). It seems
fair to assume that most of this growth during the school years is the effect of schooling, but
also that schools have not yet found a way of ensuring that every child grows as much as
possible. This focus on growth is a far cry from the traditional focus on eliminating error.
Explicit teaching. The main pedagogical question, of course, is how best to help
children to grow linguistically. All that some children seem to need is experience, but others often the weaker ones - need explicit teaching. The most important effects of explicit teaching
may be in reading, where it helps them to learn better by focusing on the forms they read. A
child who reads by guessing may literally not notice unfamiliar words or grammatical
patterns, and what is not noticed probably won't be learned. The strategy places great
emphasis on making generalisations explicit, though of course the generalisations may well
have emerged from some classroom exploration.
As long as the official policy includes these principles, there is clearly a window of
opportunity for linguists to influence school teaching. Good principles in themselves do not
guarantee good teaching, because the other half of the equation is the content of what is
taught. One of the shortcomings of a great deal of traditional grammar was that its content
was intellectually weak - in fact, much of it was incoherent and dogmatic. The window of
opportunity will not automatically stay open indefinitely, and may close quickly if the content
is poor. This is why it is important for linguists to help; we can at least make sure that the
content is coherent, accurate and interesting.
Having outlined the institutional and pedagogical background, I shall now describe
some of the ways in which linguists have been able to help in developing the teaching of
English language and literacy in English schools; I shall distinguish between primary schools
and the first three years of secondary schools. In the English school system, primary schools
cover 'key stages' 1 and 2 (KS1, KS2), which are years 1 to 6, and the first three years of
secondary school are called KS3. My focus will be on grammar because this is the area
where linguists have had some influence. Regrettably we have had no influence on initial
literacy, though linguists could in principle help to clarify notions such as phoneme-grapheme
correspondence and the way in which phonology and morphology interact in spelling. The
later years of secondary school have not yet gone through the same changes - which of course
raises interesting questions for the administrators! I wish I could add a section on foreignlanguage teaching, but this is currently going through a period of turmoil - some would say a
period of terminal decline - in which niceties about teaching methods and content are low on
the agenda, so I have no good news here; but it is obvious that foreign-language teaching
should be affected by the fact that pupils now have a metalanguage and conceptual
framework for talking about language.
Grammar for KS 1 and 2 (Years 1 to 6)
In the world-wide debate about grammar teaching one of the main questions concerns
terminology: should the teacher use specialist metalanguage? In the UK context this is not an
issue: technical terminology is accepted as a necessary part of explicit teaching. Indeed, the
documents that launched the National Literacy Strategy included a glossary of 200 technical
terms, of which about 90 related to grammar. These are terms which teachers are expected to
use in class, and which children learn to use; so the UK's primary schools are now full of fiveyear olds talking about phonemes and adjectives. Since these documents had the official
stamp of approval, this glossary counts as the first-ever government-sponsored glossary of
grammatical terminology in the UK.
This glossary provided the first opportunity for linguists to contribute to the strategy.
As it was part of the documentation which launched the Strategy, every primary school
received a printed copy; but unfortunately the grammatical entries were riddled with errors.
We offered to fix the errors, and our offer was accepted. Although the original paper version
is still in all our primary schools, our revision is the official version which is now on the
official website5 and which is included in all new publications. It isn't perfect, but it is by and
large compatible with modern linguistics; for example, it distinguishes determiners from
adjectives and declarative sentences from statements. This glossary turned out later to have
been an excellent starting point for our later interventions because it gave a stable set of basic
grammatical concepts and terms.
Our other major contribution at this level was to a publication called Grammar for
Writing6. This is a 200-page book which was again distributed to all primary schools, and was
intended to help teachers to use grammar in improving children's writing at KS2. This time
we were brought in during the writing stage, but again our role was a purely technical one.
5
It can be found via http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/literacy/publications
6
Grammar for Writing is not available on the internet, but free copies can be ordered
from dfee@prolog.uk.com
The in-house author welcomed our comments on the grammatical content of drafts, and
invariably acted on them; and once we had shown that we could be relied on to behave
responsibly, we were even given two units to write on our own.
The book includes the revised glossary and a number of other useful items, but the
bulk of it consists of a series of teaching units. Each unit covers two pages and gives enough
information for at least one lesson under the following headings:
$
the relevant curriculum objectives,
$
the relevant subject knowledge,
$
a suggested classroom activity,
$
a suggestion for shared writing (where the teacher either models the writing process,
or acts as scribe for the class's suggestions).
For example, here is a unit for year 5 on the differences between speech and writing.
Objectives
To be aware of the differences between spoken and written language, including: conventions
to guide the reader; the need for writing to make sense away from immediate context; the
use of punctuation to replace intonation, pauses, gestures; the use of complete sentences.
Subject knowledge
Written language is different in many ways from ordinary unscripted speech, so writing is not
simply a change of medium.
$
There is no immediate context which defines >here=, >now=, >you= and >I=; the
writer must define an >internal= context and maintain it consistently.
$
The production process is much slower and more conscious, so it is difficult to
maintain the internal context and writers often have difficulty in using pronouns and
tense consistently.
$
Writing can be revised and subjected to conscious scrutiny.
$
Writing is structured in terms of larger units which have no equivalent in speech: e.g.
paragraphs, bullet points, headings; and punctuation; speech is interactive and is
organised primarily in terms of >turns=, where pauses, body language and eye
movements are important signals.
$
Punctuation is used instead of intonation, but the two systems do not correspond
precisely.
Writing, like speech, may vary in style from casual to formal - e.g. from notes and family
letters to essays, published texts and official letters. Formal writing is governed by relatively
strict conventions including the following:
$
It must be in standard English.
$
Sentences as shown by punctuation must be complete - i.e. they must contain a main
clause.
Suggested activities
$
Find a tape-recording (or even better, a video) of a commentary on a football match,
and transcribe it faithfully, without punctuation but with some convention to indicate
pauses. [This is followed by an example.]
$
Find a volunteer in the class to read the transcription in the style of the original, and
discuss any problems that arise - e.g. from the lack of indication of intonation. Ask
how accurate a picture of the game the commentary gives. (There should be plenty of
expertise in the class!).
$
Collect and classify - prepare collectively for a translation into a written account to be
included in a newspaper article.
$
Collect the verbs and classify them for tense. Discuss the reasons for the
choice of tense and how the tenses would be different in writing.
$
Collect the references to players and classify them as proper nouns, common
nouns or pronouns. Discuss the reasons for the choices and how the written
account will differ.
$
Collect examples of patterns that are specific to football commentaries (e.g.
AIt=s ... to ...@). What would happen to these in writing?
$
Collect >incomplete sentences=, discuss how effective they are and ask how
they should be treated in writing.
Ensure children apply this sentence level learning in their own writing.
Shared writing
$
Write a coherent written report of the section of the match reported in the
commentary, and compare the two line by line.
$
Build a collection of differences which follow automatically from the difference
between speech and writing.
$
To encourage them to reflect on the writing process, discuss what these differences
show about the processes of speaking and writing.
$
Do the same for the processes of listening and reading.
$
Discuss the ways in which the writer can help the reader as reader.
My impression is that primary schools find Grammar for Writing very helpful, so we
hope that our contributions played a part; but we recognise that it was only a small part.
Perhaps the most important point to notice is how the lesson aims to deepen the children's
understanding of the writing process. It gives them concrete things to do with grammar, such
as collecting verbs and classifying them for tense; but it also makes them think about the
process: for example, why did the writer or speaker choose that particular tense? It helps them
to theorize and generalise, but it also provides an opportunity to apply some of their
generalisations immediately in their own writing. In short, grammar is taught systematically,
but it is also closely integrated with the children's own writing. In this way the strategy
manages to resolve the tension between teaching grammar systematically and making it
relevant. Grammar is not taught as a separate topic, but neither is it taught only 'when needed'
(which in effect tends to mean 'never', because most of grammar is too complex to teach as
needed).
Grammar for KS3 (Years 7 to 9).
The ideas of the National Literacy Strategy for primary schools have since been extended to
secondary schools through the English 'strand' of the 'National Strategy for Key Stage 3'. The
main difference between primary and secondary schools in the UK is that a primary teacher
covers nearly all subjects with a single class, whereas (at least in principle) secondary
teachers are specialists who teach one subject to a number of different classes. However, the
recent changes have put secondary teachers of English in a difficult position, because
although most of them are English graduates, few of them studied language (or linguistics) in
their degree. Since most of them didn't learn grammar at school either, most secondary
English teachers in fact know as little grammar as primary teachers. This is clearly a problem
now that grammar plays such an important part in English teaching.
A government agency - the Teacher Training Agency - tried to solve this problem by
commissioning a set of self-instruction training materials for English teachers. This time,
linguists were involved from the start in producing the training materials, and we wrote units
covering most areas of grammar relevant to the school curriculum. This material was revised
numerous times to take account of comments from educational experts, so the result is a
product of many hands, and much better than anything a linguist alone could have achieved
alone. Unfortunately the project ran into technical and financial problems and was dropped,
but the material is available on the web as a set of interrelated hypertext documents.7 The
following description is meant to indicate the range of grammatical topics that turned out to
be relevant to teaching writing at this level.
The self-instruction training material is divided into three sections:
$
sentence-level grammar
$
text-level grammar
$
punctuation
This division is important not so much because of the boundaries that it implies, but rather
because of the explicit recognition it gives to grammatical patterns that go beyond the
sentence - 'text-level grammar' - and to matters of punctuation. This is typical of the whole
Literacy Strategy, and distinguishes this approach to grammar from more traditional
approaches in which grammar deals with word classes and elementary sentence structure, and
very little else. The primary literacy strategy has a particularly helpful intellectual framework
in which grammar has three parts:
$
word-level grammar - word classes, vocabulary, spelling, some punctuation
$
sentence-level grammar - the syntax of phrases, clauses and sentences, most of
punctuation
$
text-level grammar - how words and syntactic patterns help to hold a text together.
The training material also respects this three-way division in spirit, though word-level
patterns are included in the section on sentence-level grammar because these two areas of
grammar between them are about equal in length to the whole of text-level grammar. This
again shows how important text-level patterns are in the teaching. Sentence-level gramar has
six units while text-level grammar has five, and two further units are dedicated to
7
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/tta/KS3.htm
punctuation. Here, then, is the overall structure for the material:
$
$
$
sentence-level grammar
$
word classes (including inflectional contrasts)
$
word families (i.e. lexical relations, including derivational morphology)
$
spelling
$
phrases
$
sentences and clauses
$
coordination
text-level grammar
$
cohesion: connectives and logic
$
anaphora and reference
$
sentence structure and importance
$
tense and time
$
person and viewpoint
punctuation
$
word-level punctuation (including apostrophes and hyphens)
$
sentence-level punctuation
This material is all freely available on-line, so there is no point in giving extended examples.
However I should like to highlight two characteristics which, in my opinion, should be
particularly appealing to teachers and trainee teachers: the explanations and the relevance.
The material is aimed at teachers who know nothing at all about grammar, so it takes
nothing for granted. On the other hand, it does assume that teachers want to understand some
of the theoretical underpinnings of their subject-matter, so it tries to engage the user's
intelligence. For example, it introduces the notion of word classes by pointing out that a verb
cannot generally be replaced in a sentence by a noun, or vice versa; and that this is still true
even when the verb and noun are synonyms (e.g. know, knowledge). This is very different
from the traditional approach to word classes, the so-called 'parts of speech'. That approach
invites the learner to switch off intelligence while memorising the list of classes and the socalled 'definition' for each. These definitions are in fact an insult to anyone's intelligence, as
so many people have pointed out over the years. Verbs are not 'doing words' (think of the
verbs be and understand), nor are nouns the names of persons, places or things (is knowledge
a thing? and if it is, what about know?). It is much easier to explain word classes through
syntactic replacement tests, and much better because it moves grammar from dogma to
science. A teacher who understands the factual and theoretical basis for grammar is bound to
teach it better than one who believes it is inscrutable nonsense.
Another noteworthy feature of the material is that it aims at relevance. The general
topics were all chosen because they were important for English teachers at this level of
schooling, and within each unit the subject-matter is constantly related to issues in the
teaching of writing at that level. For example, most units include at least one sample of
writing by year 9 pupils to illustrate the grammatical strengths and weaknesses typical of this
age.
For example, the unit on sentences and clauses includes the following short extracts.
Passage A
I=ve found 1 million pounds that=s right. I [was] walking home from school and I saw a
bin bag in front of me. I kicked [it] over and the bag split open. I looked in and there was a
pile of money in there. I took it home and counted it and there was a million quid. What
shall I spend it on?
Passage B
It happened last night, in the park. I was there, with a few mates, you know doing the usual
sort of things, scaring old ladies, engraving a few names on the park bench. It was getting
late, about half an hour before I needed to be home, so Sadie and I decided to go for a walk
the long way home as we were both freezing and boredY
Both extracts were supposed to be letters to a friend, so the casual style is appropriate. (This
is a good illustration of how the curriculum encourages pupils to write in a range of styles
rather than just in a formal one.) However the point of the comparison is the stark
grammatical difference between the two.
Passage A consists of nothing but main clauses, with or without coordinating and; this
simple stringing-together of clauses is much more typical of primary writing, and well below
the standard expected at secondary level (Perera, Katharine, 1984). In contrast, Passage B
contains numerous subordinate clauses. The commentary on this passage is as follows:
The writer of this extract uses the subordination patterns more typical of adult prose,
with non-finite verbs such as doing, scaring, to be and to go, and subordinating
conjunctions such as before and as. The only example of the writer using the
co-ordinating and is to link nouns or adjectives, not clauses.
These two passages show why it is important for teachers to teach about subordinate clauses.
Writer B may have learned to use them well without help from a teacher; but writer A clearly
has not, and it is at least possible that explicit discussion of sentence structure would be
helpful.
Some other contributions by linguists
It would be wrong to leave the impression that the educational reforms have affected nothing
but the teaching of writing by native speakers of English - far from it. Nor is this the only area
where linguists have been able to offer technical expertise (though I have to admit it is the
area where I myself have been involved most). Here is a brief list of other government
initiatives in which linguists have been involved in one way or another:
$
'English Department Training Files - Module 10: Grammar for Writing'. A set of three
units for use in a one-day in-service training session with the English Department in
every secondary school.
$
Grammar for Reading. Another set of material for in-service training of teachers, this
time focusing on reading at secondary level. Its rationale is that children are more
likely not only to understand what they read, but also to expand their own
grammatical repertoire, if they pay attention to the grammatical choices made by
authors. If that is so, teachers should draw their attention to grammatical
constructions, which in turn means that teachers themselves need to be confident with
grammatical analysis.
$
Grammar for English as an Additional Language (EAL). This material is for training
teachers of EAL to help pupils who do not speak English as their first language.
The government has also commissioned linguists to do original research on the grammar of
spoken English and on the grammatical weaknesses of EAL speakers.
I should like to end by reporting a recent development which seems to me to indicate
very clearly how radical and deep-seated the revolution in teaching is. The Times Education
Supplement (TES) is a weekly newspaper for teachers with an estimated readership of
400,000, so it presumably reflects the mood of the moment. It naturally carries a great deal of
discussion of the new strategies for improving literacy and teaching English, including critical
comments on the way the strategies are organised - too prescriptive, too little time for
extended reading or writing, and so on; but the need for instruction in grammar is not a major
issue. Primary teachers seem to accept it without reservation, and secondary teachers are more
uncertain than opposed. However everyone agrees that grammar is difficult because of its
technicalities, so the TES has commissioned a weekly column on grammar from a school
teacher (Geoff Barton) and myself.8
If anything proves the relevance of grammar to school teaching, this column does not because of the quality of what we write, but because we never have any problem in
finding something to write about. Here is a selection of the topics that we have covered so far:
$
the benefits of nominalisation
$
the function of the word that
$
greetings in different languages
$
how to express causation
$
what is the longest English word?
$
why use grammatical terminology?
Both grammar and language teaching are so rich that we feel the connections are almost
unlimited.
Reference List
Aitchison, J. (1981). Language Change: Progress or decay? London: Fontana.
Aitchison, J. (1994). Words in the Mind. An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon.
Second Edition. (2 ed.) Oxford: Blackwell.
Andersson, L. & Trudgill, P. (1990). Bad Language. London: Penguin.
Battistella, E. (1999). The persistence of traditional grammar. In R.Wheeler (Ed.),
Language Alive in the Classroom (pp. 13-21). Westport, CT: Praeger.
8
The published articles can be downloaded from
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/TES.htm
Carter, R. (1994). English teaching in England and Wales: Key reports. In R.E.Asher
(Ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (pp. 1137-1138). Oxford: Pergamon.
Corson, D. (1994). Language Across the Curriculum. In R.Asher (Ed.), Encyclopedia
of Language and Linguistics (pp. 1932-1933). Oxford: Pergamon.
Crystal, D. (1984). Who Cares about English Usage? London: Penguin.
Halliday, M. (1964). Syntax and the consumer. In C.Stewart (Ed.), Report of 15th
Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies (pp. 11-24). Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press.
Halliday, M. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic. London: Arnold.
Halliday, M., McIntosh, A., & Strevens, P. (1964). The Linguistic Sciences and
Language Teaching. London: Longman.
Hawkins, E. (1987). Awareness of Language: An introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hawkins, E. (1994). Language awareness. In R.E.Asher (Ed.), Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguistics (pp. 1933-1938). Oxford: Pergamon.
Hudson, R. (2001). Grammar teaching and writing skills: the research evidence.
Syntax in the Schools, 17, 1-6.
Hudson, R. (2004). Why education needs linguistics (and vice versa). Journal of
Linguistics.
Marland, M. (1977). Language Across the Curriculum. London: Heinemann.
Perera, K. (1984). Children's writing and reading :analysing classroom language.
Oxford: B. Blackwell in association with A. Deutsch.
Tomasello, M. & Bates, E. (2001). Language Development: The Essential Readings.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Trudgill, P. (1975). Accent, Dialect and the School. London: Arnold.
Wilkinson, A. (1965). Spoken English. Birmingham, UK: Educational Review,
Birmingham University.
Wilkinson, A. (1994). Oracy. In R.E.Asher (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and
Linguistics (pp. 2879-2880). Oxford: Pergamon.
Wray, D. (1994). Language and Awareness. Hodder and Stoughton.