Language Study in Secondary Education — Some Comments

Abstract

As a linguist I have tried to give a few reasons as to why I think that language study is important in the secondary school and I have attempted to give a few suggestions for starting points for the type of explicit language study which could form part of our secondary school curriculum. It is a teacher's task, not the linguist's, to decide on order of priorities in the classroom, to decide on the sequencing and grading of such material. There is an urgent need for linguists and teachers to collaborate in devising a valuable and sensible programme of systematic language study that would benefit many other areas in the curriculum. Nofes 1. Doughty, Pearce and Thornton, Exploring Language, Arnold, 1972. 2.A Language for Life, HMSO, 1975. 3. Doughty, Pearce and Thornton, Language in Use, Arnold, 1971. Quirk et al., Grammar of Contemporary English,Dr Stork is a linguist and naturally refers from time to time to linguistics. He consequently runs the risk of being shunned by many teachers of English, for whom 'linguistics' is as much a bugaboo as 'grammar'. Such a negative reaction would be regrettable, for he is concerned only with those areas of linguistics ('the study of how language works') which are properly of concern to teachers of English language. Moreover, his general thesis is eminently reasonable and realistic; there is indeed 'an urgent need for linguists and teachers to collaborate in devising a valuable and sensible programme of systematic language study'-and not just to benefit areas of the curriculum other than English.If, by rejecting the Doughty distinction between language study and linguistics, he means to emphasize the role of the language teacher as scholar, this is admirable. Many teachers, perhaps especially of English, have in recent decades seemed to incline more to well-meaning but often sentimental concern about children and society and less to the responsibilities of scholarship in their subject. Nevertheless, since the Doughty distinction sees language study not as opposed in any way to linguistics but as part of it (Exploring Language, p. 39), it does not seem inconsistent with Stork's own selecting of starting-points for school language-study. Moreover, the distinction is of practical use at a time when syllabuses for Advanced Level English Language work are taking such various titles as 'English Language' and 'Linguistics', as well as plain 'English' and (part of) 'Communication Studies'.