As always, I am solely responsible for errors and omissions, and will welcome correction.
The author and publisher are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce extracts from copyright material:
Edward Arnold for Learning How to Mean by M.A.K. Halliday.
Cambridge University Press for Genre Analysis by J.M. Swales, 1990.
Cambridge University Press for the extract from S. Daniel ‘Poems and a Defence of Rime’ (1599) in Images of English by R.W. Bailey, 1992.
Cambridge University Press for Introducing Applied Linguistics by S.P. Corder, 1973.
Cambridge University Press for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by D. Crystal.
A.M. Heath for George Orwell: Collected Letters and Journalism. By permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.
Little, Brown & Company for The Tidy House by Carolyn Steedman, published by Virago Press.
John Murray (Publishers) Ltd. for Beyond Euphrates by Freya Stark, published by John Murray.
Oxford University Press for ‘Applied Linguistics: its meaning, its use’ by W.F. Mackey in Applied Linguistics Vol 1.
Oxford University Press for ‘Models and Fictions’ by H.G. Widdowson in Applied Linguistics Vol 1.
Oxford University Press for Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights’ & ‘DocE. CN. 4/Sub.2/1988.25’ from Linguistic Imperialism by Robert Phillipson © R.H.L. Phillipson, 1992.
Oxford University Press for ‘Teacher Professionalism & Research’ by Christopher Brumfit, from Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics, edited by Guy Cook and Barbara Seidlhofer © Oxford University Press, 1995.
Oxford University Press for Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching by H.H. Stern © H.H. Stern, 1983.
Oxford University Press for Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics edited by Guy Cook and Barbara Seidlhofer © Oxford University Press, 1995.
Pearson Education for Planning Language, Planning Inequality by J.W. Tollefson, reprinted by permission of Pearson Education Limited © Longman Group Ltd.
Pearson Education for Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics by J.C. Richards, J. Platt, and H. Platt, reprinted by permission of Pearson Education Limited © Longman Group Ltd.
Peters, Fraser & Dunlop for The Cruise of the Nona by Hilaire Belloc. Reprinted by permission of PFD.
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press for A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, Cambridge, Mass. Copyright © 1971 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The Estate of Sir Karl Popper for Knowledge and the Mind-Body Problem and The Myth of the Framework by Karl Popper.
The Times Literary Supplement for review by Mary Midgley of Secrets by Sissella Bok, TLS April 1984, 563.
H.G. Widdowson for Learning Purpose and Language Use published by Oxford University Press, 1983.
H.G. Widdowson for Explorations in Applied Linguistics published by Oxford University Press.
PART ONE
Language and education
1 Language, linguistics, and education
Language is central to education; linguistics is the discipline devoted to the study of language. But the study of language within the educational process takes us far beyond linguistics alone, as the discipline is currently conceived. This book outlines some of the ways in which language interacts with human behaviour, and the ways in which that interaction affects education. The purpose of this book is (1) to describe a field of human enquiry which has only fairly recently been studied in any detail, and (2) to exemplify an approach to educational linguistics which reflects the many disciplines beyond linguistics that must inform our attempts to understand language in social use. Inevitably, therefore, I shall be drawing upon knowledge from recent research and simultaneously describing a current research programme – the process of trying to understand language in education. In this chapter most of my specific examples relate to British education, but the British educational context is shared by many other countries, and as later chapters show, I hope, the principles described below are relevant to most education systems.
We are only just beginning to assimilate recent developments in linguistic understanding to the varying practices of different groups of human beings, and language within the educational process is still a relatively unformed field of study. Indeed, when I was appointed to the Chair of Education at Southampton, in 1984, it was the first appointment of a linguist to such a chair in Britain. Others had been appointed to chairs concerned with the direct teaching of particular languages, but this was the first time that a chair had been set up to relate to the general field of language and linguistics in education. When I gave my inaugural lecture, delivered primarily to a non-specialist audience, I entitled it Is language education? or Is education language? Of course, neither ‘language’ nor ‘education’ is as limited as this formulation implies – but there is still a sense in which, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, education is conceived of as the accumulation by individuals of discourses relating to different areas of activity, communicating with groups of people with shared interests: in science, in sport, in culture, in technologies. And there is a further sense in which language can be seen as a never-ending process of repertoire extension (and repertoire reduction), in which the learning process cannot be separated from our constantly changing linguistic knowledge and linguistic practice. Understanding how these processes interact is exciting and challenging; but it is also immensely demanding, for if our aim is to understand human beings using language, we are addressing at once the most complex and the most creative aspects of human behaviour. We need to be not just rigorous scientists if we are to comprehend language as fully as possible; we need to be poets and mystics as well.
‘Language’ and ‘Education’ share two disadvantages that many other areas of study avoid: they are both too familiar. We all use language, and many of us have strong views about it; we have all been educated, and we all have strong views about that. Expertise confronts experience, and experts have a difficult task defending their own expertise against others’ perceived experience.
Yet language is full of puzzles that experience alone cannot solve, and one of the greatest of these is the exact relationship between speech, writing, and the whole educational process. For a start, language operates on many levels and with many functions simultaneously, so that the relationship is always complex. Consider as an example a highly formalized educational event, such as the inaugural lecture referred to above. The structure of an inaugural lecture (at which customarily new professors deliver a public introduction to their field to an audience of colleagues, students, and outsiders) seems to be a carefully erected memorial to the relationship between education and language. What, after all, could be more of a memorial to language than a lecture: a text of dead words written to be spoken as if living? And what could be more of a memorial to education than a ritual recitation by an elderly person in formal dress intoned to a silent gathering of fellow mourners? Typically, the inauguration of a new professor is celebrated in a rite of words; typically too for education, some would cynically say, they are words that cannot be interrupted or debated. Yet no one who has experienced education in any form will doubt the major role that language plays in the practice of educational institutions. The desirability of this can be disputed, but we must concede the fact.
The inaugural lecture is partly a means of communication, to a very diverse audience, but it is also a formal rite, a symbolic event in academic life, and perhaps in the social life of the community outside the university. It is a means of communicating knowledge, but it is a means also of establishing solidarity,