English Teaching: Practice and Critique
Volume 4, Number 3 (December 2005): Focus: Knowledge about language in the English/literacy classroom
Editor: Terry Locke (University of Waikato, New Zealand)
Rationale: The aim of this double issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique is to
revisit, historically situate and extend a number of current debates on the
broad topic of knowledge about language in the English/literacy classroom. In
part it was prompted by a paper by Dick Hudson and John Walmsley, entitled "The
English Patient: English grammar and teaching in the Twentieth Century" which tracks the relationship between linguistics and the teaching of grammar
in classrooms in England. A number of contributors to this issue have used this paper as a reference point for their contributions. Contributors to Part 1 of this double issue come from a range of educational settings: the United Kingdom, the USA, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand.
Readers will find that contributors to this issue go way beyond the perennial issue of the teaching of grammar
and its effectiveness/ineffectiveness as in relation to literacy development. In differing ways and with different emphases, the conversation which has been formalised here can be represented by the following questions:
- What is meant by "knowledge about language"?
- Whose knowledges are we talking about when we refer to "knowledge about language"?
- In what ways is "knowledge about grammar" subsumed under the term "knowledge about language"?
- What relationships exist (as productive or non-productive) between the development of linguistics as an academic domain, and educational policy and practice in respect of the presence of "knowledge about language" in the English/literacy classroom?
- What (if any) justifications exist for the inclusion of "knowledge about language" in an "intended" curriculum as knowledge worth knowing for itself?
- How is knowledge about language affected by the technologised nature of its object?
- Put another way, how does metalanguage need to change under pressure from the increased digitising and graphicisation of texts and text-based practice?
- Are there any sustainable arguments for a positive relationship between knowledge about language (however understood) and increased effectiveness in some aspect of textual practice (reading/viewing or production)?
- What is the relationship between metalanguage and metacognition?
- What pedagogical frameworks or approaches appear to render "knowledge
about language" effective or ineffective as a component of literacy teaching
and learning?