The Importance Of Language In English
Because linguistics is a relatively new science, most of what linguists have learnt about language over the past six decades or so has rarely been incorporated into the school curriculum or communicated to the general public. This is a rather unfortunate situation since education has a lot to gain from integrating linguistics into the pre-existing language curriculum. Although I will draw mainly on my experience with the English curriculum in the Singapore context in this article, my points can be generalised to the teaching of other first languages in other countries.
There are two extremes in the ways we can teach language. One approach involves explicit instruction about words and the structure of language. The other approach is implicit
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Its main focus is on how language is used in actual situations and emphasises the importance of the wider context in studying language. Students learn to use linguistic concepts to analyse language choices in texts and to discuss issues pertaining to the relationship between language and society such as: “How does gender and social class affect the way we speak?”, “What is the role of English as a global language today?” and “How is the Internet changing the English language?”.
However, some of the material taught in this course could easily be infused into the English curriculum at the secondary school level. As I have argued so far, knowledge of language need not be seen as a specialised domain from which only a few students can benefit, and can instead be infused into the first language curriculum to complement it and make it more
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One of these is descriptivism, which is an approach to language which tries to describe how language is actually being used, and contrasted against prescriptivism, which aims to prescribe to learners one version of language deemed to be “correct”. The general educated person often believes that there is a “correct” form of language, and that we ought to prevent ourselves from deviating from it and lapsing into “bad, broken English”. This is a result of the lack of active efforts by teachers to promote an honest, value-free approach to the study of language – one which recognises that ‘correctness’ in language is dictated by the norms of actual
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