Introduction

What follows is an account of my attempts to introduce modern linguistics into the school curriculum. This account is quite personal; yet I believe it fairly represents the general development, or lack thereof, of this sort of work in the United States: from work in headier days on large projects directed toward bringing about fundamental changes in the language component of the English-language curriculum to working one-on-one with a teacher here and another there. My relationship to this effort is perhaps different from that of other people who have put their mind and hand to it because of its longevity: forty-five years and counting.

There was another approach, a publisher-promoted one, that I'll not discuss. This is best illustrated by The Roberts English Series, an attempt to bring a very rigid, programmatic approach to transformational grammar into the K-12 language arts curriculum (Roberts 1967). For a critique of that failed attempt, see O'Neil (1968a).

And there are other ways in which linguistics has tried to connect with education: informing the teaching of reading and of foreign languages, dealing with language prejudice, and so on. The important work of Walt Wolfram is a model of how and why to bring sociolinguistics into the schools in order to instill both an understanding of and respect for language variation and to combat language prejudice (Wolfram and Reaser 2005).