The article reviews a number of changes in English schools that can be attributedto the influence of linguistics. The most obvious one is the introduction of a courseon the English language, which occupies about a third of the last 2 years of secondaryschool (A-level English language) and which has proved extremely popular withpupils. Other changes are due to two influential ideas: language awareness (thesubject ‘language’ unites English and foreign-language classes and pupils shouldlearn about its general characteristics) and knowledge about language (pupils shouldlearn explicitly about language structure). These two ideas have had a major impacton recent changes in the teaching of both first-language English and foreignlanguages, both of which have emerged from a ‘grammarless’ period; the teachingof grammar (and other aspects of language structure) is now required by officialdocuments, although it is not always easy for teachers who themselves know littlegrammar.
1. Introduction
Can linguistics influence school-level education? Indeed, should it do so?Linguists are divided on the second question, but I believe that educationneeds us (Hudson 2004). But even if it is desirable for our research toinfluence education, is this possible in the real world, and especially in thereal world of English-speaking countries? After all, there is a history in thesecountries of silly ideas about language teaching that any linguist could refute– most obviously prescriptive ideas about good and bad grammar. Couldthere be some inherent and deep-seated incompatibility between research-based ideas from linguistics and school-level policy on language education?
This article is a description of a number of fairly recent changes in theeducation system of England – Wales and Scotland are somewhat different,although both have undergone similar changes. All these changes can betraced directly to the influence of linguistics, and they are all supported bothby bottom-up grassroots enthusiasm among teachers and also by top-downofficial legislation. The most strikingly successful example is the A-levelcourse in English language, which I describe in Section 2, but there areothers that I outline more briefly in Section 4. The intervening Section 3
Language and Linguistic Compass 1/4 (2007): 227–242, 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00015.x
sketches the historical background to these changes, so this is where I providemost of my evidence for the influence of linguistics. In a nutshell, I arguethat an extreme reaction against arid grammar teaching in the 1960s and1970s produced a language-teaching vacuum that linguistics has filled. Ifinish with some thoughts about how these changes might generalise toother countries and education systems.
The new elements that have been imported from linguistics all share oneor more of the following characteristics with the teaching and research thatcan be found in any university linguistics department:
• students learn to study language rather than to change their language;• students acquire knowledge about language rather than just knowledge
of it;• students learn to apply general ideas about language in investigation and
observation;• students learn a metalanguage for talking about language structure and
use;• students learn to compare languages; and• students study all kinds of spoken and written language, and not just the
language of literature.
The innovations described below mean that every child in our schoolsshould have experienced at least some of these elements during their schoollife, subject to obvious reservations about teacher competence.
2. The A-level in English Language
Advanced-level (or A-level) courses are taken by students in the last 2 yearsof secondary school. In our rather odd education system, as soon as educationbecomes optional (at age 16, i.e. after Year 11), it also becomes specialised,so students at Advanced level who are aiming at university typically studyjust four subjects in Year 12, reducing to just three in Year 13 (their lastyear at school). This means that a full A-level course has about a third ofthe total available time through 2 years – a significant allocation of time. Thisgenerous time scale is clearly important when an A-level subject is a totallynew subject for the students taking it, as in the case of the A-level coursein English language (ALEL); further details about the examining bodiesand their course specifications are available on the Internet at http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/ec/gce.htm.
The present form of ALEL reveals a complex history dating back to theearly 1980s with roots not only in linguistics but also in both literatureand ‘creative writing’. The key figures in its history were all teachers orteacher-trainers who were well-informed and enthusiastic about linguistics:George Keith, Denis Freeborn and Tony Tinkel (Freeborn 1987, 1998;Tinkel 1988;Keith 1990,1994;Freeborn et al. 1993;Keith and Shuttleworth
2000). The role of linguistics was explicit; for example, an early coursebookstarts as follows:
The purpose of this book is to demonstrate how the formal study of language –linguistics – can be applied to written and spoken English in order to describestyles and varieties of language use precisely and accurately . . . how a linguisticstudy can help to identify those features of a text which make it distinctive.(Freeborn et al. 1993: xi)
However, these enthusiasts faced the same fundamental challenge as allthe others who have seen the relevance of linguistics: how to tailor thecourse to the needs of existing teachers who have no formal qualificationsin linguistics. Clearly there was no point in aiming at a course grounded ina solid grasp of the technicalities of linguistics that very few teachers couldteach.
The solution was to compromise by building on the interests and skillsthat English teachers do have: the close study of texts, an interest in styleand genre variation, and enthusiasm for original and creative writing. Themodern ALEL exam developed out of three different courses that evolvedindependently in the 1980s, each of which had its own characteristics; butby far the most successful of these owed at least some of its success to theconcessions it made to English teachers. The most striking of these survivesinto the modern exam in the form of a test of the students’ own writingskills, which, at least in the eyes of most linguists, have little or nothing todo with the analytical skills of linguistics. However, even this surprisingelement has an analytical component thanks to a linguistic self-commentaryon the writing, and in any case the original writing element is only one-thirdof the total course. However, there can be little doubt that this writingexercise is part of the reason why ALEL has been so popular with bothstudents and teachers.
A tangible measure of this popularity is the number of candidates (for moredetails, see http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/ec/gce.htm#howmany).After the first full ALEL course was launched in 1983, as an ‘experimental’A-level with just 210 candidates in 1985 (Bleiman and Webster 2006), thenumber of candidates doubled every year for a decade ( John Shuttleworth,personal communication), and 20 years later it is still rising – see Figure 1.(This graph only shows candidates for one examining board, albeit the mostsuccessful one. Unfortunately exact figures are not available for the earlyyears.) In 2005,ALEL was the 11th most popular A-level subject (out of alist of 80 subjects), with about 16,000 candidates, rising to 28,000 if weinclude those who took a related exam in which language and literature arecombined. To put this number into perspective, about 1200 new under-graduates register each year in UK universities for degrees which includelinguistics as at least a minor element.
Fig. 1. Entries for AQA6 A-level English Language, 1990–2006 (source: AQA).
but systems (such as verb paradigms or vowel systems) are much more abstractand totally unfamiliar to most students. If presented with two texts forcomparison, any student can say at least something about them, evenif it is trivial (e.g. one is longer) or intuitive (e.g. one is more interestingor harder to read). However, the aim of ALEL is for students to beable to analyse texts using what the official definition of ALEL (seehttp://www.qca.org.uk/3063_2395.html) calls ‘frameworks for the systematicstudy of language, including phonology and phonetics, lexis, morphology,grammar and semantics’. In theory, at least, this is pure linguistics, althoughthe practice may fall short of the analytical skills we would expect in alinguistics undergraduate. But in spite of the focus on texts, the analyticalrequirement means that courses must also devote significant amounts of timeto the underlying language system, and when well taught there can be thesame productive interaction between texts and systems as we find inlinguistics research.
The best way to describe ALEL is through a fairly typical lesson. Thefollowing description was written for me by Dan Clayton, who teachesEnglish (including ALEL) at a college in South London (see http://englishlangsfx.blogspot.com/).
The plan for this lesson was to look at youth slang in south London, processesof change and how young people feel about their language. Equipped with aslang dictionary from 2005, an article from The Guardian on slang on the screenbehind me and slang bouncing off every wall every day, we started . . .
‘Nang?’ I said.‘Is that word still used round here?’‘No that’s from East,’ comes a reply.‘They don’t even say that anymore. It’s “peng” now,’ says another.Slowly the whiteboard starts to fill up with new definitions.‘Buff ’ is now ‘choong’, ‘merked’ is just ‘moist’ now everyone’s using it, while ‘losers’are now ‘wastemans’.‘Bling’ just gets a derisory laugh.‘My nan says bling,’ scoffs one.
Soon we had the whiteboard covered and it was time to draw the linguisticstrands together.
With discussion of semantic change, in-group and out-group language and somereference to code-switching, soon we’d looked at slang as the counter-language– the opposition to whatever standard has been imposed at a given time – we’ddiscussed how slang gives power to those traditionally seen as powerless and I’veset a homework that doesn’t need to be marked because it gets posted onto ablog where students can record new slang terms as they hear them.
This lesson illustrates several of the key features of ALEL:
• Students are actively involved rather than passive recipients.• All varieties of English are accepted as objects of study.• Generalisations are drawn in terms of theoretically motivated frameworks.• The aim is to deepen the students’ understanding of language.
With teaching like this, the popularity of ALEL is hardly surprising.However, teaching like this does require a teacher with more under-
standing of linguistics than most teachers of literature and creative writinghave. The main constraint on the course’s growth has been the availabilityof suitable teachers rather than of students, so one reason why Englishliterature candidates still outnumber ALEL candidates is simply that everyschool or college that offers A-level courses offers English literature, but notall offer ALEL. Where both are available,ALEL often outnumbers Literature.ALEL is often taught by experts in literature who depend on varioussupport systems for their linguistic expertise and teaching ideas. There is acertain amount of in-service training for teachers (listed at http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/ec/courses.htm), a great deal of trainingand teaching material available online on specialised websites, especiallyTeachit (http://www.teachit.co.uk/) and Universalteacher (http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/default.htm, a site freely developed by anextraordinarily talented and energetic teacher, the late Andrew Moore)and a dedicated email list called Englang (http://markboardman.com/englang/englangfront.php), which has no fewer than900 members and every day generates 10 or 20 messages requesting andoffering help. Looking into the future, we may expect existing teachers togradually become more expert in linguistics, and new recruits willincreasingly come from linguistics degrees.
ALEL is a particularly clear example of how linguistics has influencedschools in England. It is an exercise in linguistics in all but name and showshow popular the study of language can be when suitably packaged.
in most English classes during the 1960s, producing ‘the first grammarlessgeneration’ (Keith 1990: 83). The reasons for this change are complex andcertainly include the very poor quality of most grammar teaching at the time(Hudson and Walmsley 2005; Crystal 2006: 199 –207), so in many ways itis a cause for celebration; but it left a vacuum in the English class that tendedto be filled either by literature or by creative writing in the hope thatinspiring models or unguided practice would be enough to improve languageskills – a hope that turned out, of course, to be ill-founded.
About a generation later, a similar crisis developed in foreign-languageteaching, the other main kind of language teaching, but in this case theproblem was how to persuade students to study the subject once they hadthe chance to drop it. The best indicator of the problem is the number ofentries for French and German (the main foreign languages offered in ourschools) at Advanced level, which has declined steadily since 1992 – seeFigure 22 (Moys 1998: 39; Mitchell 2002; Kelly and Jones 2003: 8). Foreignlanguages are officially recognised to be in crisis (Moys 1998;The NuffieldLanguages Inquiry 2000;Anon 2002).
In both first-language English and foreign languages, therefore, theeducation system has been in deep trouble for some time and public concernhas produced strong ‘top-down’ pressures from the government to findsolutions. The Crowther Report of 1959 (Central Advisory Council forEducation 1959) concluded:
We are all agreed that ‘mastery of language’ is one of the most important elementsof a general education and one where there is little ground for complacencyabout the effectiveness of present teaching methods . . .
Crowther suggested that part of the problem might be the end of Latinteaching, and called for ‘a rethinking of the whole basis for linguistics in theschools’ (Central Advisory Council for Education 1959, quoted in Hawkins1994: 1935). It is hard to know what Crowther meant by ‘linguistics’, butit is clearly different from ‘grammarless’ teaching.
Meanwhile, of course, linguistics has been growing, and by a happycoincidence the demise of traditional grammar coincided with the rise ofmodern linguistics (Hudson and Walmsley 2005). The impact of linguisticson English schools started with a collection of essays co-edited by RandolphQuirk (Quirk and Smith 1959), which explored the ways in which linguisticsmight contribute to the teaching of English, followed by a popular bookshowing how interesting a language can be (Quirk 1962). These ideascoincided with the Crowther report cited above and presumably inspiredfirst the Nuffield Foundation (a charity that often funds innovativeeducational projects) and then the Government to fund a very large-scale‘Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching’ directed by the linguistMichael Halliday at University of College London (UCL) from 1964 till itsend in 1971 (Pearce 1994; James 1999; Hudson and Walmsley 2005); Imyself was a member of his team from 1967 to 1970, along with two otherlinguists and 10 teachers.Quirk’s later descriptive work on English grammar(Quirk et al. 1972, 1985) countered the argument that ‘[it is] impossible atthe present juncture to teach English grammar in the schools for the simplereason that no-one knows exactly what it is’ (Board of Education 1921:289) – and of course Quirk’s grammars have now been joined by a shelf-fullof massive grammars and dictionaries. This solid descriptive work supportedthe pedagogic ideas that came out of Halliday’s project and that spread rapidlythrough a large network of teachers and teacher trainers. Since 1971, whenHalliday left England, the baton has been picked up by other linguists, withDavid Crystal in the lead not only in terms of publications for teachers andpupils (Crystal 1987, 1988, 1991, 1995, 1997; Crystal and Barton 1996) butalso in terms of face-to-face contact through lectures and workshops.3
One of the main changes in our schools, which is at least partly due tothe influence of linguistics, is a remarkable reduction in prescriptivism bothamong teachers and among those who draft official documents. Indeed,prescriptivism came to such a complete end that many English teachers werereluctant even to teach standard English [e.g. Christensen (1990) and thecontinuing uncertainties expressed in Bex and Watts (1999)]. Even theofficial curriculum described in Section 4.1 ‘has totally rejected theprescriptive mentality. Standard English continues to be seen as a majoreducational goal, but it is viewed in an inclusive way, with all varieties –spoken and written, formal and informal, professional and everyday – takeninto account.’ (Crystal 2006: 206) No doubt our classrooms still containsome unreconstructed prescriptivists, but they are a small minority whosevoice is rarely heard. It is hard to know how much this change is the resultof rational argument by linguists, and how much is simply part of the generalrebellion of the Beatles generation.
However, two other new ideas can definitely be attributed directly tolinguistics: ‘language awareness’ and ‘knowledge about language’. LanguageAwareness, the idea that children should become consciously aware oflanguage as a phenomenon worth studying in its own right (Hawkins 1987,
How Linguistics Has Influenced Schools in England . 233
1994, 1999, 2005; Carter 1994b) can be traced directly to Halliday’s project.4
The term ‘language awareness’ was adopted as the name for a stronggrassroots movement among teachers who are united by two main tenets:
• that school children in the middle years (years 6 to 9) should be madeaware of language as an object of wonder and exploration by consideringtopics such as language acquisition and animal languages; and
• that language is basically the same whether it is first-language English ora foreign language, so these subjects should be taught collaboratively (incontrast with the traditional indifference or even antagonism betweenthese subject departments in most schools).
During the 1980s, schools and individual teachers had a great deal ofautonomy to innovate in this way, and language awareness spread fastthrough our schools so that by 1988, 10% of schools claimed to have coursesinspired by it (Hawkins 1994). These ideas have now been integrated intoofficial policy (as I explain in Section 4), and the movement has grown aninternational following, supported by an international association (theAssociation for Language Awareness; http://www.lexically.net/ala)and a scholarly journal (Language Awareness; http://www.multilingual-matters.com/multi/journals/journals_la.asp).
The other big pedagogical idea from linguistics is ‘knowledge aboutlanguage’, often abbreviated to ‘KAL’. This is the name for the idea thatlanguage teaching should be explicit and should therefore impart someknowledge about the structure of language and a metalanguage for talkingabout it – precisely the kind of knowledge that linguists can provide. Thisidea contrasts with the optimistic belief that children’s language willautomatically grow, without any explicit teaching, simply by exposure togood models, which dominated teaching until recently and which claimedresearch support from the educational research showing that grammarteaching is a waste of time (Macauley 1947; Harris 1962; Cawley 1957;Braddock et al. 1963; Elley et al. 1975; Hillocks and Mavrognes 1986).Explicit teaching is also at odds with the claim in mainstream linguistictheory that children neither need explicit teaching nor benefit from it whenlearning their first language. Arguments based on these premises have beenvery influential in the teaching both of first-language English (Weaver 1996)and of foreign languages (Krashen 1982). Those who advocate KAL rejectboth of these arguments, although it has to be admitted that the debate aboutKAL has been muted (Anon 1998; see also my officially commissionedwebsite defending the role of grammar teaching in the official teachingstrategy, http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/kal/top.htm). The argumentfor KAL rests on two premises: that children’s ‘natural’ language learningdoes not provide them with the full range of language skills needed inadulthood, which include written language and more formal and academicregisters; and that some children can only learn these extra varieties oflanguage with the help of explicit instruction.
The history of KAL was first expressed in public, not by linguists, but byAnon, the drafter of a government discussion document (Anon 1984), whichsuggested ‘that pupils should be taught more directly about the forms andstructures of the English language’ (Carter 1994a: 1138). Whoever Anonwas (and he or she almost certainly knew about the linguistics of the time),the idea received strong support from the linguists who served on a seriesof committees that were later set up to consider and develop this and otherideas: Gillian Brown, Henry Widdowson and Mike Stubbs. Like languageawareness, KAL is now a core element of the official view of how bothEnglish and foreign languages should be taught; and of course it is acceptedthat the content of KAL, the specific facts and ideas that should be taughtexplicitly, ultimately rest on research-based linguistics.
The main obstacle to implementing these ideas, especially KAL, is thatthey require teachers to teach things that they themselves did not learn eitherat school or (in most cases) at university. As I explain in Section 4, bothlanguage awareness and KAL have in fact been embedded in the officialdocuments that define curriculum content, but not all of the innovationsthat exist on paper have been applied to classroom practice. Primary teachersstruggle with grammar (which they also teach, as I explain in Section 4) butare happy to learn from the available training material (especially Anon2000). In contrast, secondary English teachers are bound to feel to someextent ‘de-skilled’ by the changes because the expertise in literature thatbrought them into teaching is no longer enough. The challenge, therefore,is to provide not only technical knowledge of grammar, but also evidencethat it is worth teaching. A particularly important response to this challengewas a project called LINC (Language in the Curriculum), a nationwidetraining project to spread KAL among teachers. This was directed by anotherlinguist, Ron Carter, who had strong links with the teaching profession(Carter 1990). This project only ran for 3 years (1989–1992) but had anenormous impact through its policy of involving classroom teachers:‘Enormous energy was invested in classroom studies of language at work,and many pupils were drawn into exciting research capable of increasingdramatically their linguistic understanding. Many classroom teachers’perspectives of grammar and its potential in their work were completelytransformed by the sorts of activity sponsored and encouraged by the project.’(Dean 2003: 25) Many of the teachers who were involved in LINC are nowteaching ALEL (Section 2). Carter later applied the same principle ofinvolving teachers in research on grammar to produce a very useful bookleton the grammar of spoken English (Anon 2004). Nevertheless, the in-servicetraining of practising teachers continues to be a worrying problem.
On the other hand, initial teacher-training gives some cause for optimism,thanks to a clear increase in the willingness of teacher-training institutionsto accept a degree in linguistics or English language as a relevant preparationfor training as a secondary English teacher. Whereas a survey in 1994found that all but about four of these institutions insisted on a degree in
How Linguistics Has Influenced Schools in England . 235
English (i.e. English literature), a survey in 2006 found 26 that werewilling to consider language or linguistics graduates (see http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/ec/pgce-clie.htm). This change may betaken as an encouraging measure of the increasing acceptance of linguistics inour schools.
This historical sketch is important for understanding the changes infirst-language and foreign-language teaching that I outline in Section 4.
4. Other Recent Developments
The intellectual climate described in Section 3 not only gave rise to thehighly successful A-level course in English language (Section 2), but alsoinfluenced a number of other innovations that central government has driventhrough our schools during the last decade or so. The main change was agreat increase in the amount of central control over what is taught throughthe introduction in 1989 of our first ever National Curriculum (brought inby Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative government but continued by Tony Blair’sLabour government). By and large, this change has benefited linguisticsbecause many of our ideas have been adopted as official policy. Top-downchange can work well when expert and competent civil servants can offerpoliticians good ideas, and in this case we have benefited from some verygood civil servants who happen to have been heavily influenced bylinguistics.5
4.1 ENGLISH AND LITERACY
By the time the National Curriculum came into effect, the debate aboutKAL had been resolved. An influential committee called the KingmanCommittee (chaired by a mathematician) concluded in favour of KAL (Anon1988), and a later one developed the ideas further (Anon 1989; Cox1991). The outcome of these debates was a curriculum for English thatincluded a great deal of KAL (Perera 1994b); one of the main authors ofthe curriculum was a linguist, Catherine Perera, whose area of expertise wasthe development of language in school-age children (Perera 1984, 1990,1994a). The English curriculum has since been revised twice (in 1995 andagain in 1999), but the strong focus on KAL remains. For example, a draft‘Programme of study’ for Years 7 to 9 published in 2007 (http://www.qca.org.uk/secondarycurriculumreview/subject/ks3/english/index.htm)gives the following as one of the reasons why English is an important subject:‘Looking at the patterns, structures, origins and conventions of English helpspupils understand how language works.’ Later in the same document wefind a major statement about KAL:
Language structure and variationThe study of English should include, across speaking and listening,reading and writing:
• the principles of sentence grammar and whole-text cohesion, andthe use of this knowledge in their writing;
• variations in written standard English and how it differs from spokenlanguage;
• the significance of standard English as the main language of publiccommunication nationally and globally; and
• influences on spoken and written language, including the impact oftechnology.
A note explains ‘the principles of sentence grammar and whole-text cohesion’:
This should include:• word classes, parts of speech and their grammatical functions;• the structure of phrases and clauses and how they can be combined to
make complex sentences (e.g. through coordination and subordination);• paragraph structure and how to form different paragraphs;• the structure of whole texts, including cohesion, openings and
conclusions in different types of writing (e.g. through the use of verbtenses and reference chains); and
• the use of appropriate grammatical terminology to reflect on themeaning and clarity of individual sentences (e.g. nouns, verbs,adjectives, prepositions, conjunctions and articles).
The influence of linguistics on the National Curriculum for English isvery clear, although it is too early to expect these changes to have had theirfull effects in actual teaching practice.
4.2 FOREIGN LANGUAGES
As I explained in Section 3, foreign-language teaching in our schoolsis generally perceived to be in the crisis which is documented so clearlyin Figure 2. In this graph, the crisis can be dated quite precisely to1993, with a cohort of students who started to study foreign languages 8years earlier, in 1985. Until then, the popularity of foreign languages hadbeen growing, but with this cohort the growth turned into a long andsteady decline, which affected both French and German in the same wayand at the same time. Why? One plausible explanation is that this wasthe time when the official syllabus for foreign languages espousedpurely communicative teaching, in which ‘traditional precepts of trans-lation, comprehension and accuracy were replaced by the four skills[listening, speaking, reading and writing], authenticity of source materialsand error tolerance. . . . Grammar teaching was often pushed to thesidelines in an attempt “to get pupils talking” ’ (Grenfell 2000: 24 athttp://www.ittmfl.org.uk/modules/policy/4d/paper4d2.pdf).
ideas have been misinterpreted as a justification for abandoning grammarteaching altogether. In an over-reaction against the old-fashioned grammar-translation method, communicative teaching rejected both grammar andtranslation, leaving the syllabus with virtually no intellectual challenge. Aforeign language was presented as little more than a collection of usefulphrases without any attempt at explaining their structure or how to generalisebeyond them. No wonder that 16-year-olds were pleased to abandonlanguages.
However, the crisis may already be over thanks to a major change inteaching dating from 1999. In this year a revised National Curriculum wasintroduced (http://www.nc.uk.net/webadv/harmonise?page/@id=6016),which introduced both language awareness and KAL into foreignlanguages. This trend is continued in a revised Programme of Studyfor Foreign Languages published in 2007 (http://www.qca.org.uk/secondarycurriculumreview/subject/ks3/modern-foreign-languages/index.htm),which includes the following passage that recommends language awarenessin all but name:
[Pupils] explore the similarities and differences between other languages andEnglish and learn how language can be manipulated and applied in differentways. The development of communication skills, together with understandingof the structure of language, lay the foundations for future study of other languagesand support the development of literacy skills in a pupil’s own language.
It also includes ‘knowledge about language’ as one of the ‘key conceptsthat underpin the study of languages’, and glosses it as:
• understanding how a language works and how to manipulate it; and• recognising that languages differ but may share common grammatical,
syntactical or lexical features.
As both of these ideas originated in linguistics, we linguists can take somecredit for the new approach to foreign-language teaching.
Will the new National Curriculum and its implementations help to reversethe decline in languages? The omens so far look good. For the first time,the number of entries for foreign languages in 2006 showed a modestincrease, 5% for German and 1% for French. Encouragingly, the studentsconcerned belong to the first cohort who were affected by the 1999curriculum throughout their secondary career.
5. Some General Principles for Influencing Education
There can be no doubt that linguistics has had an impact on English schools,and I believe that this influence has on balance been positive. It is true thatthis impact is most easily seen in official documents, and that there are stilla great many teachers who know too little linguistics to ‘deliver’ the newsyllabuses properly. Nevertheless, official documents do have some influence
and things are gradually getting better both in first-language English and inforeign languages.
How has this come about and are there any general principles that mightbe applied in other places? I finish with five lessons that might be drawn:
• Change takes time. Quirk and Halliday sowed seeds in the 1960s, whichgerminated in the 1980s (A-level English Language, language awareness)and finally bore major fruit in the 1990s (the National Curriculum), morethan a generation later.
• Some linguists must be willing and able to communicate with teachers.Here the prime examples are Halliday and Crystal, but there are manyothers who have played a smaller part. This communication must includelistening as well as talking.
• Individuals mould official policy. It only takes half a dozen influentialindividuals in official positions to change policy, and the impact oflinguistics is certainly at least in part due to the individuals listed infootnote 5 as well as a number of influential linguists.
• Teacher training is a challenge, but not an insuperable problem.• Linguistics can be taught successfully at school.
Short Biography
Richard Hudson was educated at Loughborough Grammar School,Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (BA) and the School of Oriental andAfrican Studies, London (PhD), and spent the whole of his working life(1964–2004) in what eventually became the Department of Phoneticsand Linguistics at University College London. Richard’s main researchfocus is linguistic theory, where he has created a theory of language andcognition called ‘Word Grammar’; but since working with Halliday(1964 –1970) he has been keen to build bridges between linguistics andschools. His most important recent publication is Language Networks. TheNew Word Grammar (Oxford University Press, 2007). His web page iswww.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Richard Hudson. Email: [email protected] I should like to thank the following for help with this article: Richard Aplin, Ron Carter, DanClayton, David Crystal, Keith Davidson, Eric Hawkins, Maya Honda, John Shuttleworth, JohnWilliams and two anonymous referees.2 Thanks to The Centre for Information on Language Teaching for the figures for 1988 and 1989.3 David Crystal calculates (personal communication) that he has given about 1000 live presentationsto teachers or pupils.4 ‘There should be some place for language in the working life of the secondary school pupil. . . The development of awareness has a marked effect upon a pupil’s ability to cope with thewhole range of his work . . .’ (Doughty et al. 1971: 10)5 Civil servants tend to remain anonymous, but there is no doubt that the following have beenresponsible for spreading the influence of linguistics:
• Peter Gannon and Ron Arnold (HMIs, i.e. school inspectors, with close links to Halliday’sproject and enthusiasm for language awareness and KAL)
• Sue Hackman (Director of the Secondary National Strategy; she once gave the mostconvincing talk about grammar teaching that I have ever heard)
• Janet White (a senior member of the English team at the Qualifications and CurriculumAuthority, and a linguist who studied with Halliday)
• Gerry Swain (Director of the English strand of the Secondary National Strategy, who has aBA in English and Linguistics)
• Stephen Anwyll (previously Director of the National Literacy Strategy; as a youngforeign-language teacher he taught language awareness)
• Lid King (National Director for Languages with a degree that included linguistics).
6 The modern examining board called AQA (the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance) is theresult of a series of exam-board mergers, so some of these candidates were examined by itspredecessors.
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