Introduction

Can linguistics influence school-level education? Indeed, should it do so? Linguists are divided on the second question, but I believe that education needs us (Hudson 2004). But even if it is desirable for our research to influence education, is this possible in the real world, and especially in the real world of English-speaking countries? After all, there is a history in these countries of silly ideas about language teaching which any linguist could refute – most obviously prescriptive ideas about good and bad grammar. Could there be some inherent and deep-seated incompatibility between research-based ideas from linguistics and school-level policy on language education?

This chapter is a description of a number of fairly recent changes in the education system of England – Wales and Scotland are somewhat different, though both have undergone similar changes. All these changes can be traced directly to the influence of linguistics, and they are all supported both by bottom-up grassroots enthusiasm among teachers and also by top-down official legislation. The most strikingly successful example is the A-level course in English Language, which I describe in the following section, but there are others which I also outline. The intervening section sketches the historical background to these changes, so this is where I provide most of my evidence for the influence of linguistics. In a nutshell, I argue that an extreme reaction against arid grammar-teaching in the 1960s and 1970s produced a language-teaching vacuum which linguistics has filled.