(279 & 280) COLLEGES OF EDUCATION

This selection of units offers a short introductory course on language. Intentionally, there is no attempt to place the course in the context of any one department, or within any one Course-Education, Curriculum or Main. It assumes a minimum of six two-hour sessions available for it, fortnightly throughout the term, or twelve one-hour weekly sessions.

About half the course is devoted to exploring students' stock assumptions about language-its nature and function-and setting them against those which inform Language in Use. The other half is divided between an examination of the differing parts played by teacher and pupil in the language life of the school, and of the part played by language in the learning process. They apply to all students, whatever age of pupil they intend to teach.

Students need to become involved in the aspect of language under scrutiny if what they explore is to have any real effect upon their attitudes. Consequently, they must take part in the working of the chosen units and the activities they call for, not merely go through them as a study text. In this way, they modify their ideas about the nature and function of language in the light of what they discover for themselves not in the light of what they are told. For this reason it is better to use the time available on a small selection of units worked through in detail, rather than to take a cursory glance at the subject matter of all. By dividing up the group, however, it might be possible for all the units to be looked at, each small group making a different selection, with seminars at regular intervals to discuss each group's reports on their findings.

The nature of language

The first essential in any modification of the students' preconceptions about the nature of language is to see that they understand that language is used for specific purposes in particular situations. For this purpose, three key aspects can be drawn upon:

(a) that language can only be considered meaningfully within a context

(b) the immense variety of forms of the language appropriate to different situations.

(a) Language in context

Language is used in such a way that its use will provide clues to help the listener (or reader) understand what is being said, provided that he can relate it to context. B4 'Notices' invites an examination of the language used in notices to see how far their meaning depends upon features outside language itself. E4 'Half, please' isolates familiar bits of language and asks what they suggest about the setting in which they normally occur, while C8 'Words and gestures' examines the part played by gestures in conveying meaning.

(b) Variety in language

One way of approaching varieties of language is through a sequence of units, such as B1 'Formal and informal', B3 'Reading the News', G1 'Telling the tale' and K7 'Letters'. BI 'Formal and informal' establishes that there are varying levels of formality in the spoken language, and this notion is taken up and explored in the written language in the others. Another way of approaching this topic would be to take some variety of language not treated seriously by students and show that it is, in fact, a variety of language performing an essential task in the life of society. A suitable unit is J4 'Social talk'.

This leads to a consideration of the relationship between spoken and written language. C6 'Intonation' and H9 'Being tactful' enable the student to explore linguistic patterns which occur only in the spoken mode, and by asking for part of a tape-recording to be written out, C I 'Speech and writing' examines some of the problems of representing speech in writing. The relationship between sound and symbol that is the basis of the orthography may be introduced through C1 0 'Spelling'.

To round off this part of the course, the student should be brought to face the fact that some features of language are predictable, because there are only a limited number of lexical and grammatical patterns available to its users at any one point in a text. D2 'Order in sentences' allows students to discover how predictions may be made about the likely occurrence of words in sentences, while D3 'Words in sequence' explores the limits put upon the way in which words are ordered in the noun phrase in English. Other units in theme D may be used as alternatives.

Language in school

As an organized and separate community, the school will exert pressure on all its members' use of language, pressure of which they will be, for the most part, unaware. In this sense, the school is a speech community, and its nature can be explored through JI 'Belonging to a group' or K1 'Schools and colleges', which deal with various aspects of joining and belonging to an organized community like school. The way in which we speak is an important part of the information other people use to assess us as individuals, and it is essential that students should grasp what an accent or dialect is, from a linguistic point of view. This is handled in C4 'Accent' and F 10 'Regional Speech'. Allied topics are explored in F9 'Speaking "correctly" ' and H6 'Being natural'.