In schools in the United States as well as in teacher education programs, knowledge about language, when it is considered seriously at all, is generally pursued only insofar as it is believed to be a tool for achieving some other curricular goal – better language use in, say, reading or writing. However, from another perspective, one that we hold, the formal study of language is self-justified. Given this view, there is intrinsic value in attempting to understand something as intriguing and difficult to explain and as central to human nature as one's tacit knowledge of language, in developing linguistics literacy: scientific literacy about the faculty of mind referred to by linguists as “mental grammar.”

We realize that it is unusual to talk about promoting linguistics literacy in American schools, for the United States is close to unique among the world's nations in neglecting the study of its dominant languages, not to mention the study of other languages and language in general. In Iceland, by way of contrast, the national language is not only studied extensively in schools, but also celebrated on November 16th, Dagur íslenzkrar tungu (Icelandic Language Day), a day on which there are nationwide conferences on the language and an award given to the person or people who have served the language in a special way during the previous year.

Background

Eight years ago I turned to linguistics to help meet the needs of students in my 5th-grade English classes who identified more with math and science than they did with reading and writing. While most of my interest in linguistics centers on using a series of problem sets to give students an opportunity for scientific inquiry, I've also found that linguistic analysis interjects an important but oft-neglected topic of conversation into literature study: an author's grammatical choices. In the United States, teachers, and therefore their students, generally think of grammar as fixed and are not aware of the questions they might ask about grammatical choices. Consequently, conversations about literature focus on questions of narrative found in novels: the author's purpose, the plot, and the search for personal meaning in the themes of the story. While these are important conversations to have, there is more to explore: examining grammar is among the many ways of reading available to us (Montgomery et al. 2000).

One way of opening up this possibility for other ways of reading is to provide a text where students can't help talking about grammatical choices. The Diary of Opal Whiteley is one such text. I came across this text in 1995, and I've had the opportunity to teach it in both public and private schools and with students ranging in age between 8 and 13.