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English Education outside the United States

ENGLAND
On this page -- a personal history of linguistics and education in Great Britain, as remembered by Martin Davies [martindavies1@cwcom.net]. Martin's first account, which was forwarded to the Systemics and Education discussion list (March 19, 1998), has been elaborated (by Martin) in personal communication and edited slightly (by me) for this website.

AUSTRALIA
For a rich historical account of SFL-informed English education in Australia, see the August 2000 inaugural lecture by Professor JR Martin, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney: Grammar meets Genre: Reflections on the 'Sydney School' (from John Polias' site at Adelaide University)

Below:
MARTIN'S ACCOUNTS OF LINGUISTICS IN GREAT BRITAIN, PRE-1960s (the institutional context)
--Halliday --Tthe Language of Science
--Linguistics and Education
--INITIAL LITERACY (BREAKTHROUGH TO LITERACY)
--MIDDLE SCHOOL AND HIGH SCHOOL
--POST COMPULSORY EDUCATION --- THE 'LANGUAGE IN USE' MATERIALS

Begin history by Martin Davies :
      Linguistics in this country did not exist until 1951, I think. Language work was done in English departments, and was entirely philological until J R Firth, Michael Halliday's inspirer - became the first professor of General Linguistics. In 1965, John Sinclair - who had recently been appointed professor of English Language at Birmingham - said that there by then about 15 chairs of lingusitics, nearly all of which were held by people who had been taught by Firth.
      BUT in 1957 we'd had "Syntactic Structures", which was all the rage (and someone told me to read it when I was still a schoolmaster, but I couldn't make head or tail of it - I certainly didn't think it had any relevance to English teaching, so I was very glad to learn later that Chomsky hadn't thought it had, either). Some of the 15 chairs of linguistics - and their departments - escaped from the glamour of Firth's teaching - said to have been much more readily intelligible than some, at least, of his writing, I think - and fell into the glamour that TG had in those days. When I went to hear Chomsky at UCL, the place was packed.
      But the 15 chairs of linguistics did not always happen in departments of linguistics. People got their chairs where they could - not in departments of psychology, I think, or - then - in philosophy, but in English departments, the traditional home of the study of the English language, diachronically. And that's what happened with Quirk. Fortunately for us!
      Randolph Quirk realised that no one had done for English grammar what Samuel Johnson - in his big two-volume Dictionary of the English Language, and later, James Murray, in the Oxford English Dictionary - had done for vocabulary: no one had actually described the grammar of English of a substantial corpus of English, both written and spoken, including the intonation of the latter together with many of its paralinguistic features. Nobody, in other words, had described these grammatical and prosodic features of English, as it is (and not as it is wished to be, or thought to be), when functioning in the creation of text, which is its raison d_être.
      Yet people, especially teachers, were prescribing what they averred were the grammatical rules of English on the assumption that they were specifying the actual rules of English, presumably, and in fact actually based on a description of those rules in actual text. This was partly true, in the sense that the rules they enunciated derived - ultimately - from the 18th century grammarians, especially Lowth and Lindley Murray - who had indeed described the rules they observed in certain texts - but the texts whose grammar they described were a very restricted range of genres: exclusively written genres, at the formal end of the range, and mostly literary, historical, geographical, legal or theological. A little science, perhaps, if it were sufficiently appealing stylistically, but not much else. Dialogue was only represented by drama, and highly stylized "speeches" in epic poetry or rhodomontade. Dialects were only represented geographically, not socially, and usually in order to brand them as mistakes which were to be excluded from middle-class usage. [For example, the form it as a genitive, found in King Lear, and also in 20th century Norwich and also in some other (modern) dialects, as reported in Peter Trudgill_s PhD., was treated as a mistake for its, used in many other dialects.]
      Quirk was a polymath. What attracted me to him first was that he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, at Durham, what you might call a philologist, in fact, when I first heard of him, and he wrote a book called "The Use of English". It is absolutely excellent, and I used it as a textbook for VIth Formers. It doesn't look like philology, and it isn't: it is a thoroughly synchronic book and a cornucopia of texts of all sorts and shapes and sizes: an absolute riot of language. Previously, all I had ever had held up to me to admire (at school) had been the stodgiest of 19th century writers - you may not even have heard of them, the historians Leckie and Macaulay, and Thackeray. Then I got access to a teacher - still at school - who gave me Milton and Browning. But still very literary, and with no sense that there could be exciting writing in science or journalism.
      Oxford was different: a huge variety of writing, right back to the beginning of the Old English period, and in other languages - or in translation - as well. BUT Literature stopped in 1830! There was an optional paper in modern poetry, but we were given the impression that "this modern stuff" could not bear comparison with the great tradition, and in any case any mark you got for it could not count towards the class of your degree.
      The next book of Quirk's I found was "Essays in the English Language": half papers on Old and Middle English, and half on modern linguistics. That was after 1968, I think. It neatly bridges the gap between his old persona - the philologist - and the liguist that he became. And he got one of the most prestigious Chairs in the UK: the Quain Professor of English Language, at University College, London, and I went and sat at his feet, very profitably. The chair was held in the English department because there are two chairs - the other (in English literature) was held by Frank Kermode, who had been at the same school as Quirk - King William's College, on the Isle of Man. "Quirk" is a Manx name, I think. Q & K are both Manxmen, anyway. ...
      While Quirk was in the English Department... Michael Halliday had just moved in next door, running the Linguistics Department. Linguistics, at least under Halliday, has since …tried to break away from English Departments, and get into faculties of social science. But it has been a struggle, and lots of chairs - e.g. Malcolm Coulthard and Mike Hoey - are held by people known as linguists but inhabiting English Departments. There are pro's and cons. I lived in an English Department - having resigned from half-time in the Education department, because there was no prospect of being taken seriously there. I was the only linguist for over 20 years, and it's hard grind having to do it all, in a hole-and-corner sort of way. But in the end I got some company, and there are now three or four people with a serious interest in language in the department - not always what I would call linguistic interest: more a psychological or philosophical interest. But always a literary interest.
       …. When I went to UCL to do a degree with Quirk, & I was assigned to... one of the very few linguists I can think of that I know to have been a school teacher (of English) before he started a new career in the university world (Derek Davy), and in fact the only person in this position in the UK at that time. This was unbelievably fortunate for me, as at that time I knew I needed linguistics, but was deeply sceptical - as I still am - of the prescriptions offered to English teachers by linguists, most of whom were then addicted to the then fashionable TG [Transformational Grammar] (except the British linguists in the Firthian tradition that Halliday grew up in). & This was in 1968, ten years after "Syntactic Structures" and three years after "Transformations ... ". Before then, the only linguist I had encountered who both knew his linguistics and seemed to me to understand an English teacher's problems was - guess who? - Michael Halliday.
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HALLIDAY -- THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE
       At the same time, a public concern that ran parallel with the matter of literacy was the concern with the language of science. It was believed that school pupils wrote badly, because non-scientific teachers could not understand them, and that this was because they could not write properly. I was a school-teacher at the time, and one of my jobs was to prepare VIth Formers who were doing science for the so-called "Use of English" exam, which they had to take (to get into Oxford or Cambridge), to "prove" that they could write & [What was meant was that they had to prove that they could write the sort of belle-lettristic style that your average educated gent could write….
      The patronising of scientists on these grounds was entirely unjustified, as I had found when actually trying to teach them.. (See above.) But there were enough scientists who did indeed write badly (apart from not writing in the belle lettres style) for educationists to point to their bad writing, point out that it was bad, and claim that its alleged badness was because it wasn't "decent writing" as they understood that term, and of course this was also true: it wasn't belle lettristic any more than it was clear writing. But, again, this wasn't the reason why it was bad: it is possible to write clearly in many styles other than in the belle lettre style, and many scientists could. And some of them… couldn't. …But the slur on scientists_ writing still persists today in educational circles. It is entirely unwarranted and is in fact bunkum of a particularly refined quality. ….
      At the same time, people started saying that the language of science was different in some way from the language teachers of English purported to teach, but there was disagreement about what the differences were. So Michael Halliday got funding from something called the Office of Scientific and Technical Information for a project, and with some others - Rodney Huddleston, Dick Hudson and Alec Henrici, I think - produced a report, The Language of Scientific English, and a formidable thing it is, too.
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LINGUISTICS AND ENGLISH EDUCATION
       [In all this work by Halliday and his various co-adjutors, and by Quirk and Davy, and Crystal and Leech] there was a continuing insistence upon the primacy of description over prescriptions. The programme which led to Language In Use was called The Schools Council Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching... It operated in two ways simultaneously. On the one hand, it claimed that English teachers knew nothing about linguistics and linguists knew nothing about English teaching. (The latter didn't agree with this at first, because they had experienced English teaching as pupils; but they eventually recognized that although they had then been able to appreciate the difference between a good teacher and a bad one, they hadn't been able to suggest ways in which a bad teacher could become a better one; nor, specifically, could they say how a knowledge of linguistics could help.)
      So Halliday found some English teachers who knew they needed something, and knew that that "something" might be found in "linguistics", and were willing to learn. (I hadn_t heard about this until too late to apply to be in the team.) And he got members of his department to interact with the teachers for a year; and they wrote position papers and argued and fought, and eventually they produced ideas, and these led to practical teaching materials. Not textbooks. [What they produced included] the units in Language in Use.
      The programme identified three areas where it was felt the greatest needs for investigation and action lay: (I) initial literacy; (ii) the Middle School Years, as we called them - basically, the years when children are going into what you call High School and during which - non-coincidentally - they are going through puberty; and (iii) the period of non-compulsory education, from 16 - 18, after pupils may take their first public examination, and during which they may prepare for their second public examination, sometimes as the means of access to tertiary education of some kind. (This was where the science problem was perceived to occur, although I believe it actually starts much earlier in their school experience.)
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INITIAL LITERACY (BREAKTHROUGH TO LITERACY)
     The first group, run by David Mackay (now, I think, dead), Brian Thompson and Pamela Schaub (plus linguists - all the names I cite in these three paragraphs were experienced teachers), produced the Breakthrough to Literacy materials & together with an accompanying book with the same name (I think) which explains what "breakthrough" means. It was taken to mean a breakthrough in the teaching of reading; but it made no such claim& Rather it was intended to point to the fact that none of us knew, and still none of us know, how children make the breakthrough to the recognition that whereas twirly wiggles on the page are not necessarily writing, certain twirly wiggles encode meaning, a very important insight into language & The Breakthrough materials were extremely successful, and are still used, though teachers usually say they use other materials as well - partly to cover themselves from attack by the old guard who insist on their teaching the curiosities in the National Curriculum.
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MIDDLE SCHOOL AND HIGH SCHOOL
       The second group, run by Kathleen Wood and Ian Forsyth (plus linguists), ran into some difficulties, I believe, but produced various small-scale things, including a pamphlet which I have by me, called "Writing a Letter". And there were other things, too, but I had no contact with this group, and know nothing much about it&. ----- details of the pamphlets which came out from the middle school years team

Volume 1: "Language at work" comprised three booklets -

1: The individual and the development of language (Thornton) [Geoffrey Thornton was an ex-English teacher and a leading member of the team which ran Language in Use programme".]

2: You never speak a dead language (David Birk). [I never saw this, and know nothing about it. I never met the author.]

3: An exercise in linguistic description (R A Hudson). [Prof. Hudson is a linguist who worked in the programme and taught me a great deal. He eventually broke away from systemic linguistics, or rather from what was then known as "Scale and category" grammar, and developed his own "Word Grammar", which has a great deal to offer. I have found it of great interest, though I do not see it as mandatory reading for English teachers, though no doubt some might find it more relevant to their work than I have done. The book is a valuable exercise, an analysis of a single sentence, showing how it works. The sentence is: "Is that your kettle _cos it_s boiling." (Is it or isn_t it a question? Read all about it and find out! ) Like all functional linguistics, the sentence is not an invented one.]

Volume 2: The English writing system: notes towards a description. (K H Albrow)

Volume 3: Language and social man - Halliday . (This is a superb account of register but it is out of print. However, it forms the first and last chapters of Halliday_s 1978 book, "Language as Social Semiotic", which I think is mandatory reading for all teachers of whatever subject - - past, present and to come.)

Volume 4: Language: classroom and examinations.

Paper 1: Language studies for the middle years (Ian Forsyth)

Paper 2: English and examinations (J J Pearce)
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POST COMPULSORY EDUCATION --- THE 'LANGUAGE IN USE' MATERIALS
      The third group, consisting of the great and good Geoffrey Thornton (now alas deceased), Peter Doughty and John Pearce, plus linguists, produced "Language in Use", intended for use with VIth-Formers, but in the event used by undergraduates, post-graduates, long-term inhabitants of Her Majesty's Prisons, primary children, secondary children, students of English as a Foreign Language both in the UK and overseas, and my students out on teaching practice. It is linguistically coherent, and one of the many wonderful things about it is that it is so flexible. There is no structure: the teacher decides whether to use it or not and, if so, when to use it and to what extent. The teacher MUST take responsibility for her or his own teaching: the textbook will not do it for her or him.

      All this has been by way of preliminary to saying what "Language in Use" is. It is not a book - although it looks like one: like language, it is a resource. It is a ring-bound folder, containing a collection of 110 sheets of paper, each of which outlines a Unit, each of which is prefaced by an introduction. These units are grouped in three sections, containing four or three sub-sections:

I. Language - its nature and function. This contains 45 units, in four sub-sections -
A: Using language to convey information,
B: Using language expressively
C: Sound and symbol i.e. phonology and phonetics, and
D: Pattern in language, i.e. grammar);

II. Language and individual man. This contains 33 units, in three sub-sections-
E: Language and reality,
F: Language and culture, and
G: Language and experience

III. Language and social man. This contains 32 units, in three sub-sections -
H: Language and individual relationships,
J: Language in social relationships, and
K: Language in social organisations

      Each Unit is an exploration of some facet of language. All these were drafted, pre-tested, tested, and some were discarded or re-written (many times), before they were given out to teachers to try. Teachers found them useful, but in the end, when Halliday emigrated, and the teams broke up, the impetus was lost, and only a few teachers now use them & Each Unit can be used in whatever way a teacher wants, according to the time she or he wants to allocate to it, out of the total time available. It may last only ten minutes within a lesson; it may last a week or a semester. Only the beginning may be used, or only the end or middle. A group from within one unit may form the basis of a week's work or an afternoon's. It will not tell you what to teach or even how to teach & but if I had the power to enforce it, every teacher in training - whatever their speciality - would have to experience the use of it by a professor who understood it, and would themselves have to buy a copy, and in their training would be required to formulate their reasons either for using it or for not using it in their teaching whatever subject... they teach. No exceptions!
      In addition to the ring-binder, many working papers were produced in the course of about seven years work, some for internal consumption - which are more precious than much fine gold, if you can get hold of them - and also there were a number of books which were published, both by the Schools Council and also by Edward Arnold. There were 12 Schools Council booklets, which were very much in the way of working papers, trying to work out a philosophy of English teaching. (In my own current resource, I am finding that a major problem in the last 150 years has been the absence of a consensus about what "Subject English" really is. There was fierce debate about it in the 60s and 70s, both in the UK and the US, but a consensus has never been achieved, although one good thing which came out of it might have been agreement that language came into it somewhere, as literature also did. But "How?" and "In what proportions?" and "With what else?" …..

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