Page 201 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 15: Branches in Linguistics: Educational Linguistics

is in a sense a loaning of linguistic understanding to another field. The second is more valuable, but Notes
is more difficult, and involves individuals understanding sympathetically the nature of two distinct
approaches to understanding and practice.
15.1 Two Disciplines: Education and Linguistics

Much human activity could be described as educational, for human beings are distinguished by their
capacity to learn, and learning is usually co-operative. "Education" can refer both to formal activity
within controlled and planned educational institutions, and to the more informal upbringing of
children or helping adults who wish to benefit from others' experience. Language is of course the
most distinctive means of human communication and therefore for transmission of cultural
understanding, skills and value systems.
The disciplines that have developed for the study of these two phenomena are known in higher
education as "Linguistics" and "Education", but their histories as the sources of professional and
scholarly understanding have taken different routes. Both are characterised, like most disciplines, by
the tension between tidiness and manageability on the one hand, and closeness to their object of
study on the other. The first takes us towards idealisation and formal models, and the second towards
contextualisation and embeddedness in "real world" data. Linguistics has tended to move towards
idealisation and formalisation of data, while Education has tended to resist calls for a formal science
of learning. This is partly because Education is inevitably bound up with conflicting goals about the
nature of the society it is aspiring to create, and political debates about control and investment.
Linguistics is less liable to external political interference in the definition of its goals and procedures.
Nonetheless, language and learning are so deeply implicated each with the other that it is difficult to
conceive of a study of education in which communication and language are not central issues.
One effect of the different domains that each of these addresses is that Education, as studied and
taught in higher education, is regarded as a field of human activity which can be investigated from
the standpoint of many different, well-established disciplines: history, philosophy, psychology,
sociology, among others - and of course linguistics. Branches of Education include not only pedagogy
(procedures for effective teaching), but curriculum design, policy, comparative education, and the
traditional core disciplines of earlier teacher education (but now largely abandoned) of psychology,
sociology, philosophy, and history of education.
Linguistic study impinges on Education through two main routes. First, it has been the core discipline
in work on teaching languages, mostly foreign and classical, but to some extent mother tongues.
Second, it provides a foundation for studies of communication in the general educational process,
mainly in relation to (a) literacy, (b) social behaviour in formal educational settings, and (c) learning
processes.

15.2 The Historical Relationship between the Disciplines

The close relationship between language and education is recorded for almost as long as either has
been discussed. Certainly, in the western tradition since classical times the association of learning
with rhetoric, reflected in (eg) Quintilian, testifies to a close connection between educational standing
and oral linguistic performance. Even stronger has been the association between education and the
development of literacy (reflected in the widespread use of the term "grammar school"), though this
has also been closely connected with the political concerns about who, and how many, in any
population should learn to read and write.
Current practice is most directly affected by the past century's greater involvement of government in
all levels of education, including HE. This saw an immense increase in access to formal education
throughout the world, alongside a similar increase in our understanding of contemporary, particularly
spoken language use.
In English-speaking countries much HE work on the interface between the two fields has been driven
by the expanding market for English as a foreign language, and for professionally qualified teachers
in this field. This has been part of a world-wide development in which government agencies in most

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