Page 202 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes countries funded their educational provision to respond to pressures from a wide range of sources.
Between them, parents, taxpayers, international agencies and researchers influenced governments
with three major aims. These were (a) to increase multilingualism, including especially command of
English (b) to defend minority cultures and thus minority languages in the face of a greater threat by
global economic and political power, and (c) to exploit linguistic understanding that had been acquired
as the volume of research in this field increased.
Language in education work has to make sense of the effects of these pressures on current educational
practice. It is clear that the three aims potentially conflict with each other.

15.3 The Contribution of Linguistics to Education

Areas in which Linguistics has been seen to contribute to understanding the total education process,
beyond teaching methodology, include the following:
1. the relationship between language and cognition;
2. the role of language as a socialising agent within educational institutions;
3. the relationship between language in the educational institution and the wider community;
4. the role of language in general educational policy, in relation to (for example) national and
international literacy policies, language in development, and language as a marker of local,
regional, national and wider identities;
5. language and its relationship to power structures and the manipulation of communicative
strategies by those with power.
Areas in which Linguistics typically contributes to work on language pedagogy include the following:
1. Basic descriptive and analytical work to establish skills necessary for (eg) describing target
models and styles, learner errors or literary sources (conventional phonology, morphology,
syntax, lexis, semantics, discourse);
2. Sociolinguistic studies, geared to the understanding of language variation and change;
3. Institutional sociolinguistic work aimed at national and educational language policy decision-
making;
4. Language acquisition and learning;
5. Categories for the structure of language curricula: formal, functional, situational, etc.
6. Research methods for understanding language use in the classroom (or in other acquisition
settings);
7. Language and ideology: power relations, the development of languages of wider communication,
language loss (both individual and societal) - providing the context of much language teaching;
8. Various specialised fields: literary stylistics, lexicology, etc for courses with particular
orientations.

15.4 Educational Linguistic

First named as a field 30 years ago and defined in two introductory books (Spolsky, 1978; Stubbs,
1986), the title "Educational Linguistics" was proposed by Bernard Spolsky in 1972 for a discipline
whose primary task would be "to offer information relevant to the formulation of language education
policy and to its implementation" (1974:554). It is an area of study that integrates the research tools of
linguistics and other related disciplines of the social sciences in order to investigate holistically the
broad range of issues related to language and education.
In his book "The Handbook of Educational Linguistics", Spolsky (2008) says that he first proposed
the term "Educational Linguistics" (EL) because of his dissatisfaction with efforts to define the field

196 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY