Noncompositional

Teaching Linguistics

Way back in March of 2004, in the first issue of the 40th volume of the Journal of Linguistics (article link for those with access), an article by Richard Hudson (but everyone calls him “Dick”) appeared entitled “Why education needs linguistics (and vice versa).” Those without access to the journal’s online archives can download the article in RTF here).Hudson neatly summarizes much of the work done by linguists in the UK to encourage the use of linguistics in pre-university curricula, and makes positive noises indicating that in the future schools will have linguistically-informed language and literature courses. He goes on to discuss why linguistics needs education, but he means something different by “education” in that part of the paper, so I’ll go over that later.

First, however, he says something that I wasn’t aware of, namely:

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.

Interesting. A footnote quotes the Olson et al. paper: “Maybe that [professional linguistic] training just doesn’t help you to be useful to other people. In fact, it doesn’t.” That’s quite a statement. I’d like to think that training in linguistics makes me at least a little helpful to at least one person in the world. Perhaps I should give up on that dream, though.

Hudson identifies three concepts of modern linguistics that could be of use to educators: ideas, models, and descriptions. Since anyone can just go and read the article, I just want to point out some points that were surprising to me, especially as compared to education in the US (Hudson also sometimes explicitly compares linguistics education in the two countries as well). First, ideas. Linguists seem to have won a battle by encouraging the idea of descriptivism: official language documents “now use the term ‘non-standard’ where previously they used ‘wrong’ (or ‘error’)” (109). Though this may seem trivial, it allows teachers the ability to (or at least hints that they should) recognize well-formed non-standard speech, and instruct students to learn a standard dialect instead of to just stop speaking “wrong.” Of course, some may still see a problem with the basis of comparison: namely, all language variants are not something, and the standard is beyond comparison. A nice alternative mentioned in the article is “normal” (non-standard) and “prestige” (standard). Very PC, but not all that informative, and slightly against intuition – I don’t predict it catching on.

Hudson later discusses linguistic models (that’s his item number two) as providing useful basic information about the structure of language, such as “letters are not the same as sounds,” and “lexemes are different from word-forms and inflections.” Can you imagine middle schoolers with lexeme in their standard vocabulary? That would be amazing. The word does have an x, though, and I hear the kids these days love that sort of thing.

Hudson then moves on to discussing his third item, descriptions (we’re on page 112 now, if you’ve been following in the journal article). He makes some, I think, insightful comments about the differences between how linguists and non-linguists approach texts:

Many of us learned about language systems first by learning a foreign language in a systematic way at school [...]. We know fairly precisely what kind of a thing a language system is, but most other people have very little idea even that a language might have (or be) a system. What they feel much more comfortable with are texts—individual bits of speech or writing. They can focus on texts, discuss them and make judgements; in short, they can relate both intellectually and emotionally to texts but not to systems. For most of us linguists, I suspect, it is the other way round: give us a verb paradigm and we can say something sensible, but show us a paragraph and we don’t know where to start. (emphasis added)

Ah, quite cutting, and possibly even true. Hudson claims that “what is needed here is [...] a linguist’s ability to relate global properties to specific linguistic patterns. And indeed, Hudson says that in the UK the “Advanced-level English Language” subject, which has a good linguists background, has proved very popular, and even “inspires a lot of school-leavers to apply for places in linguistics departments.” This can only be a good thing. And here, I’ll insert a story about myself. In my second semester at college, I took a comparative literature class team-taught by two linguists-turned-literary-scholars. A lot of the class focused on stylistics and we went into detail on deontic and epistemic modality and the discourse motivations for various ways of codifying information (like, for instance, using the passive voice). It was quite enlightening, though some students found the topic rather opaque, and if I myself hadn’t been taking an introduction to linguistic science class at the same time, I might have been a bit lost as well. Hudson is enthusiastic on the introduction of such material at a high school level (or so I would guess), but I am slightly more skeptical. It would, as Hudson acknowledges, take a while for the standard toolkit for school teachers to be updated and for the teachers to get sufficient training.

Hudson does, however, present the results of some experimental studies that revealed that teenagers taught a version of transformational grammar could correctly produce tree structures for novel sentences, explicit language structure instruction resulted in better writing quality, and students instructed in how to systematically explore the structure of their own language showed an improved ability to reason scientifically. And “[e]ven more encouragingly, the children enjoyed it and described it as fun” (this for the last study). He concludes, “although education does not need our theoretical disputes and tentative research, it does need three of our ‘finished products’: general ideas about language, theoretical models of how it is organised and how it relates to other things, and specific and more or less technical descriptions” (115). I agree heartily that (some of the) basic premises of modern linguistics could be profitably applied to the classroom, as the current state of linguistic awareness is rather dismal among most students (and I say this only because the level of awareness is matched by an equally high level of confidence among most people about their own language).

The “vice versa” part of the paper is rather different, and it mainly discusses how linguists should pay more attention to how the process of schooling and education can change a speaker’s language. I’ll just bring up one study that caught my interest, where two groups of people—Ph.D. Students and clerical workers—were presented with three-word sequences such as bird house black and asked to interpret them. Although Hudson does not describe the “massive differences” that resulted (which, presumably, reflected level of education), though I can hazard a guess. Namely, those with less formal education were more likely to find a likely meaning for the sequence, giving the “speaker” of the sequence the benefit of the doubt; in other words, taking the form with a grain of salt. On the other hand, those with more formal education were more likely to preserve the form at all costs, arriving at some perhaps unlikely results (uh…the black which is associated with bird houses, or something like that). Another example might be phrases like walnut reconfiguration identifier, which don’t make sense, but could, if you just told me what the heck it was. In any case, this is not so much the field of education providing material for the pedagogy of linguistics, but rather a call for increased information exchange between those who know the effects of teaching on youth and those who study the linguistic behavior of such youth (okay, Hudson didn’t say that much – he basically just said “we should pay more attention to how formal education affects the brain”).

And so ends a very long discussion about an article you probably should have just been reading yourself. This topic interests me quite a bit, and in fact at the LSA meeting several months ago there was a session on linguistics in education, which generally concluded: it’s good, but hard as heck to get done. As I’ve thought about what it might be like to teach below the college level, talk like this is quite encouraging (and hey, wouldn’t it be cool to help usher in a new era of the most field in the world, linguistics?)