Why education needs linguistics (and vice versa)

Abstract

One of the fundamental questions on which we linguists disagree is whether or not our subject is useful for education. On one side is a long tradition, stretching back to the classical world, in which the practical benefits were clear and agreed – for example, the early Stoic grammarians aimed to improve literary style (Robins 1967: 16), and the Latin grammarians wrote pedagogical texts for use in school (ibid.: 54). In modern times this tradition is represented by leading linguists such as Tesnière (1959) and Halliday (1964), whose work has been motivated at least in part by the desire to improve language teaching at school. On the other hand is an equally long philosophical tradition of ‘pure’ scholarship for its own sake, in which the only motivation was a desire to understand language better. Recently this tradition is most clearly represented by two linguists who otherwise have little in common, Sampson (1980) and Chomsky (Olson, Faigley & Chomsky 1991), both of whom have denied that linguistics has, can have or indeed should have any relevance to language teaching.The aim of this paper is to defend the traditional idea that linguistics has an important contribution to make in language teaching, though I shall not of course suggest that every piece of academic research should have a clear pay-off in terms of practical benefits. ‘Blue-skies’ research is just as important in linguistics as in other disciplines. All I shall argue is that our discipline, seen as a whole, has an important interface with education, and that research whose results cross this interface is just as important as that which feeds into, say, neuroscience or child development. Indeed, I shall go further by arguing that academic linguistics is weakened if we ignore the impact of education on language, so information must cross this interface in both directions. If the interface is important even for ‘pure’ research, it follows that we cannot simply name it ‘applied linguistics’ and leave it to those who call themselves applied linguists. My point is that the debate is relevant to all linguists, however ‘pure’, because if education has a profound impact on language, we should know rather better than we do at present exactly what that impact is.

Overview of Professional Education of Linguistics Students at Universities of Great Britain

“…In his study, a prominent British linguist Hudson (2004) emphasises that language plays a fundamental role in the development of any subject. Each subject has its own terminology and presentation styles which are characterised by specific features that only theoretical linguists can analyse and explain to students much more effectively than specialists without relevant training.…”

“…Each subject has its own terminology and presentation styles which are characterised by specific features that only theoretical linguists can analyse and explain to students much more effectively than specialists without relevant training. Yet he believes that the education process should not be complicated with dogmas and research concepts of theoretical linguistics, since three -products‖ of linguistics are important, namely, general characteristics of language concepts, theoretical models of their organisation and their relations with other disciplines (Hudson, 2004).…”

A history of the LAGB: The first fifty years

“…The last topic is education, the external concern with which the LAGB has had its most long-lasting, consistent and effective engagement. The LAGB has always included members who argued that linguistics has a great deal to contribute to language education, such as Michael Halliday, David Crystal, Katharine Perera, Michael Stubbs and myself (Halliday 2007, Crystal 2002, Perera 1984, Stubbs 1986, Hudson 2004). These ideas have had a somewhat sporadic but long-lasting influence on conference programmes, starting with the ' sections ' (see section 2 above) on 'Language Teaching and Language Learning '.…”

For What and for Whom Is Our Research? The Ethical as Transformative Lens in Instructed SLA

“…For example, postpositivists (Stokes, 1997), pragmatists (House & Howe, 1999;Putnam, 2002;Rorty, 1999), critical realists (López & Potter, 2001), and radical constructivists (Christians, 2000;Denzin & Lincoln, 2000) do not agree with the separation of these two goals. And at least several illustrious linguists and applied linguists have felt that the fusion between knowledge and utilization is natural to and beneficial for their research programs (e.g., Ferguson, 1998;Martin, 2000;Spolsky, 1990;Tucker, 2000; see also Hudson, 2004).…”