An A-level in Linguistics



English Drama Media (journal for members of NATE) February 2007, pp 21-26

Language for its own sake.

Towards an A-level in Linguistics

Richard Hudson

At the moment, A-level courses are available in English Language or English Literature, in a foreign language, in psychology, and in a host of other subjects that have something to do with language; but not in linguistics, the study of language for its own sake. Fifty years ago this would have been an entirely natural state of affairs – linguistics hardly existed even in our universities, let alone in our schools. Neither linguistics nor the schools were ready for it. But since then the world has moved on. To at least some people, the list of A-levels has an obvious gap where Linguistics should be. This article explains why, and what some of us are doing about it.

A linguistics lesson

But first, a starter activity to give a feeling for the kind of thing that might happen in an A-level linguistics lesson. The setting is an inner-city school where most students’ home language is a language other than English. The general topic is ‘writing systems’, which has been introduced by a brief tour (courtesy of David Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language) through the shared history of the alphabets used for English and for Arabic. A young man who has learned Arabic at home (though his family language is actually Bengali) gives a short presentation about the Arabic characters and illustrates them with the Arabic-script version of his own name, Muhammed.

To the surprise of the uninitiated in the class, it emerges that he writes the consonants but not the vowels. How is that possible? The discussion ranges over the virtues of brevity and the beauty of the characters before homing in on the language’s sound system: the vowels can often be guessed partly because there are only three of them, and partly because the surrounding grammar gives a lot of clues. (When pressed, Muhammed admits that extra vowel letters are available when needed, but the radical difference from English remains striking.) How does that compare with English? The class agrees that English has more vowel letters than Arabic, which makes our vowels harder to guess; but another difference between English and Arabic words is the clusters of consonants that are so common in English but rare in Arabic; for example, ‘stry’ could be ‘story’, ‘stray’, ‘astray’ or even ‘satiry’ (if the word existed). The lesson ends in a lively argument about whether our alphabet would be suitable for Arabic.

This little example illustrates a number of the features of our planned A-level. First, the teaching includes a mixture of teacher-telling (about the history of the alphabets), student-telling (about Arabic) and student-thinking. It builds on what students know already, extends this by telling them new things and pushes them to deeper levels of understanding of the two. It has something for everyone, from easy facts to deep analysis, and plenty of surprises and general interest.

Second, this lesson looks at a language other than English. Given the 6,000 languages that exist, it doesn’t matter much which languages we look at – any language extends and deepens our understandingv of how ‘language’ in general works. We could look at Eskimo or Ancient Greek, and languages like these will indeed figure in the course, but we may as well use languages that at least one person in the class already knows. This has obvious pedagogical advantages, not least the boost it gives to the status of both the ‘expert’ speaker and also the language – just what’s needed for community languages in an inner-city school. But it isn’t just community bi-linguals who could provide language expertise in a linguistics course: our other main target group are the ‘linguists’ (in the other sense of the term) taking a foreign language at A-level. Even if the writing system of French is less exciting than that of Arabic, interesting comparisons with English can be found in plenty of other features of the language, from pronunciation to pronouns. The main point is to build on whatever languages the students already know so that at least they are illuminated by the course, even though many other languages are discussed as well.

Third, the lesson is all about comparison. In this case, the focus is on the languages’ writing systems and their phoneme inventories, but there are a great many other aspects of a language that could be discussed in this way, ranging from word structure to politeness conventions. Comparing two systems provides a broader perspective which deepens understanding of both, so it is an important element in any A-level course; but as our major tool for thinking and communication, language deserves this kind of study even more than other areas of life. Moreover, comparison requires analysis, an important part of any A-level course. In our lesson, the analytical question was how many vowels each of the languages has, but the analysis could have involved questions of grammar or meaning.

And lastly, our imaginary teacher could have been you – any reasonably well informed English or foreign-language teacher understands the basic issues involved, even if they may have to do some homework before the lesson. Linguistics graduates will find plenty to get their teeth into, but we’re keen to build on the enormous amount of expertise and enthusiasm in matters of language that’s already available among teachers.

Why linguistics?

Why, then, do we want to promote an A-level course in linguistics, and why now? Linguistics has everything that an A-level subject.should have (except a recognised course). Firstly, it has a solid research base, with all the imaginable badges of academic respectability, from a separate section in the British Academy to an assessment panel in the Research Assessment Exercise. This solid research basis includes a great deal of more or less uncontroversial fact about thousands of individual languages as well as a lot of plausible ideas about how these languages are organised, how they change, how people learn them and use them, and how they relate to the relevant cultures. And equally importantly, these facts and ideas have become much more accessible than they used to be thanks to two recent developments. One is the internet (Google knows a lot of linguistics) and the other is David Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and a a number of other popular introductions to linguistics that appeared in the 1990s.

Secondly, linguistics is available as an undergraduate subject, so an A-level could lay the foundations for undergraduate study of the same subject. Some 500 students every year graduate with a degree in linguistics (though it may have some other name such as English Language and Linguistics), not to mention the much larger numbers who include linguistics within a degree in some other subject such as French, psychology or communication. Any of these courses would be suitable for an applicant with an A-level in Linguistics, and it is even possible to imagine a time when so many applicants have this qualification that it becomes a requirement for some degree programmes. Of course we are not suggesting that the only satisfactory outcome of our course is an application for a BA in linguistics – far from it, as I argue below. The point is simply that an enthusiastic A-level candidate could continue the subject at university if he or she wished.

Given these underpinnings from university research and study, the main question is whether linguistics would give students the intellectual experience that we expect at A-level. We believe that it can provide all the right intellectual ingredients for a successful A-level course. The course will include two main kinds of experience: data analysis and discussion. As far as the former is concerned, it is easy to find data from other languages that are sufficiently exotic to interest and challenge any students – strange writing systems are just the tip of the iceberg – as well as data that look exotic at first glance but turn out to be just like English. Moreover, we can also provide a set of tools for handling data, so that mere data turn first into a clearly articulated problem and then into evidence for some solution. Usinge these tools, students can tackle projects and exercises of any level of challenge, from the humdrum to an original project that takes a high-flier to the frontiers of research.

The other kind of experience is discussion of general issues and ideas. For example, are there any primitive languages? Why do languages change? Does our language influence the way we think? Why do languages die? How are they born? What is the relation between spoken language and written language? Linguistics can illuminate all these issues through reasoned argument and evidence, and by and large linguists speak with one voice on such matters. This linguistic perspective is an important experience for A-level students because nobody approaches these issues with an empty mind – popular culture provides a set of views which are, by and large, wrong. A-level subjects should change students’ minds, and these issues are all sufficiently important to deserve attention.

One question which some people ask is whether linguistics is inherently too hard for school-age students. Fortunately, we have evidence that it isn’t: the Linguistics Olympiad. This has been taking place annually for some decades in Russia, and more recently it has spread to various other countries in Europe (see the end of this article for an internet link). The main lesson to be drawn from these events is that enthusiastic secondary students are able to do the kind of linguistic analysis that we see as the more challenging half of our course. For example, when presented with twenty words (and their translations) from a completely unfamiliar language, they can work out a new word in that language and even formulate the rules that they applied in generating it. Of course, it could be objected that only very able students compete, but as in the real Olympic Games they obviously represent the tip of a much larger iceberg and serve as an inspiration to the rest of the world.

Why now?

In short, linguistics is a very suitable subject for study at A-level. But why now? We think this is a good time for proposing it because a number of recent developments in school all call out for linguistics. In fact, linguistics is already embedded in the ordinary KS1-4 curriculum, albeit under other names such as Knowledge About Language (KAL) or Language Structure. The box [below?] outlines the relevant history and explains how linguistics has influenced everyday thinking and practice in the teaching of both English and Foreign Languages.

For example, English teaching is based nowadays on a set of attitudess to non-standard dialects and casual speech that are pure linguistics. The earlier view was that the only ‘correct English’ was formal written standard English, but nowadays both non-standard dialects and casual speech are accepted as rule-governed rather than wrong. At the same time, it is not simply a case of ‘anything goes’: different kinds of English are needed in different situations, and in formal writing it is Standard English that is needed. Both of these enlightened views derive from linguistics, as does the idea that language structure is an open book, waiting to be explored and (where necessary) taught. The Literacy Strategy and the Secondary Strategy both encourage language investigation, and any investigation of language is an exercise in linguistics. It makes no difference whether the investigation applies to spelling patterns or cohesive devices, to dialect or genre differences: if it starts with linguistic data and leads to an understanding of the patterns, then it is linguistics. The NATE grammar books show what can be done in this area, and how far English teaching has come in the last two decades since LINC.

And then, of course, we have A-level English Language, the great success story of the shift towards language. With over 20,000 candidates per year, this shows how interesting language is for sixth-formers. The syllabus combines three strands: the study of English language, the comparison of texts and the development of writing skills. The first of these is pure linguistics as applied to English, but it is the second strand, text comparison, that dominates the teaching and examining. On the whole, linguists focus on the language system rather than on texts, so when they use texts it is only as a source of evidence for the language system; for example, linguists might ask how many tenses English has, and how they are used, rather than how tenses are used in particular texts. The text-comparison strand has its roots in the study of literarature, and was included precisely to accommodate English teachers with a background in literature. The third strand, writing skills, comes neither from linguistics nor from literarature, but certainly involves an aspect of language that teen-agers find interesting. The popularity of English Language is one of the main reasons why we believe that many of these teen-agers (and others) will also enjoy a complementary study of language systems.

More recently, this focus on language has spread to Foreign Languages (FL) as well. Admittedly, it isn’t very obvious in the National Curriculum for FL as it stands (though this may change when the curriculum is revised), but it is explicit in the Framework for Teaching Foreign Languages at KS2 which was launched in 2005. Here we find, for the first time ever, an explicit official requirement that FL teaching should build on the work already done in English – in other words, the rather obvious idea that FL teachers and English teachers are both teaching the same thing: language. This idea has been around for a long time – for example, it is one of the main tenets of the ‘Language Awareness’ movement – but it has only recently become part of official thinking about education. Its adoption marks a real revolution in our language education, which is signalled in a very concrete way by the fact that an official glossary defines the terminology to be used both by FL teachers and English teachers.

This revolution is an important part of the background to our planned A-level course in linguistics, which will provide the only opportunity for students to pursue an interest in KAL for its own sake. Apart from A-level English Language, wherever KAL figures in official documents it is recommended as a means to the end of improved language skills, whether in English or in FL. Consequently, there is no point in testing KAL as such; if it is working as intended, its effects will show in the students’ use of language. This is a great weakness of the present arrangements because it ignores the needs of students who find languages interesting in their own right. The curriculum gap is no doubt especially striking in specialist language schools, where we might expect to find at least some students studying language for its own sake.

In a nutshell, our school children now learn a great deal of linguistics from KS1 to KS4, but have no chance to deepen this learning, to consolidate it or to gain examination credit for it. Hence our plan to offer an A-level course in linguistics.

Towards an A-level in linguistics

In late 2004, the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies agreed to support a small working group to develop plans for an A-level in linguistics. (The Subject Centre is part of the Higher Education Academy, the body responsible for raising the standard of teaching in universities, so it has an interest in the bridge between secondary and higher education.) The working group’s expertise includes not only linguistics but also applied linguistics and teaching and examining at A-level. (More detail is available at the website given at the end of this article.)

Our first goal is to decide how we think the course might look in broad outline, with enough detail to allow us to imagine specific lessons such as the one I outlined at the start of this article. As of September 2006 our achievements are fairly modest, and can be found on our website: a four-module overall structure and a draft scheme of work for the first module. We hope to get feedback on this material from a panel of interested teachers; if you would be interested to join, see the end of this article. We are keen to recruit teachers with any kind of experience or expertise in language, but hope to find enthusiasm not only among FL teachers but also among teachers of English Language.

The obvious next step will be for teachers to trial small parts of this first module in classrooms while we are working on the other three modules. At this stage we are both willing and able to change almost anything, so we welcome any feedback which will help to make the course viable at school. We know that it has to be attractive to students, because without student demand no examination board will adopt it; but we also know that enthusiastic teachers are even more important to our plans. Given enough interest from teachers, we are almost certain that a serious number of students would choose the course; but we cannot take the supply of teachers for granted. After all, although a lot of teachers have a serious interest in language, not many of them would claim expertise in linguistics, and some see linguistics as a dauntingly technical and rather dry subject. Needless to say, we don’t share this view and think the course could be full of interest and fun, but we need teachers to help us to make it so.

|Further information |

| |

|Our website: |

|This includes links to: |

|A paper on the background and the overall four-module structure |

|A draft scheme of work for the first module |

|A link to the Linguistics Olympiad |

|A link to the official glossary of grammatical terminology |

|To volunteer as a consultant and/or trialler. write to dick@ling.ucl.ac.uk |

|How linguistics has entered the school curriculum |

| |

|1964-71. Halliday’s project at UCL on linguistics in English teaching. |

|1973. ‘Language Awareness’ launched and becomes a grass-roots movement among teachers of both English and Foreign Languages. |

|1975, 1988, 1989. Bullock, Cox and Kingman, in reports on English teaching, recommend structured teaching of and about language, |

|i.e. Knowledge About Language (KAL), including explicit grammar study. |

|1981-2. The A-level course in English Language starts (in NEB and also in London). |

|1989-92. The LINC project channels teachers’ enthusiasm for KAL, and disseminates the main general ideas through materials (which |

|the government suppresses). |

|1998, 1999. QCA publishes ‘The Grammar Papers’ and ‘Not Whether but How’ to guide the teaching of grammar. |

|1999. The National Literacy Strategy (NLS) requires explicit discussion of language structure, i.e. KAL, as part of teaching, |

|including explicit and systematic grammar. |

|1999. The twice-revised National Curriculum for English includes some KAL, especially regarding language variation (genres, |

|spoken/written, standard/non-standard). |

|2000. The Nuffield report ‘Languages: the next generation’ finds a disastrous decline in Foreign-Language (FL) teaching and |

|learning in school. |

|2001. The new Framework for KS3 English stresses KAL. |

|2005. The new Framework for KS2 FL stresses both KAL and the need for FL to build on the KAL learned in English. |

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