Trial / Mini-Pilot Programme for teaching Linguistics to A-level students

Background to the trial:

  • AquinasCollege, 6th form college with just under 1900 students – about 800 study an English A level course. We offer Language, Literature and the combined Language & Literature.
  • Students were selected at end of start of A2 courses – they needed to have a grade A for AS in any of the English courses. They were asked if they were interested in doing the Advanced Extension Award in English (although they could attend the course without sitting the exam in the summer).
  • The idea behind this “extension class” was to teach students who were very able / gifted in English so that they were stretched beyond the normal A level courses they were doing.
  • Furthermore, many students were applying for English related courses at University and one of the course’s aims was to give them a flavour of the range of topics English-related degree courses cover.

The “Extension” course:

  • Initially 19 students signed up, but 2 dropped out in the early stages.
  • Term 1 (Autumn) covered Literary Theory – focusing on what is literature, covering approaches / thoughts about literature from ancient Greece to present-day, including Formalism, Structuralism, Post-Modernism, Post-colonialism etc.
  • Term 2 (Spring) focused on introducing linguistics (details of “scheme of work” and resources usedattached). The remainder of Term 3 was used to prepare the candidates for the actual AEA English exam.

Profile of Students:

Of the 17 students who stayed the course:

  1. 3 were A2 Language students
  2. 10 were A2 Literature students
  3. 3 were A2 Language & Literature students
  4. 1 student studied both A2 Language and A2 Literature as separate subjects.
  5. 4 students were also studying A2 French. Of these, 1 also was studying A2 Spanish and another who was studying A2 German.
  6. 1 student was a native speaker of Farsi (of Iranian origin).
  7. 1 student had lived for a few years in Hong Kong as a young child and had attended primary school there for 2 years, learning to speak / understand Mandarin Chinese.

Teacher profile:

I have taught across the entire range of English A-level courses for 5 years at AquinasCollege. I originally completed my MA in English Language & Literature at the University of Amsterdam. I trained as a secondary school teacher of English as a foreign language & taught English Language & Literature for one year at a Dutch grammar school.

Personally, I have always had an interest in languages, comparative linguistics and grammar. If A level Linguistics becomes available as a course, I would like to teach it at the College I am at (my Department Head & management are happy for me to do this).

I am a native speaker of a Flemish dialect, but I speak fluent standard Dutch and German. French to a medium-high standard (can read better than speak), can communicate at a basic level in Spanish & Italian (reading again best). Studied Latin & Greek at secondary school, fairly good knowledge of ancient Greek.Been studying Japanese for 4 years (sat GCSE this year) and can read syllabic scripts and just over 200 characters, speaking & listening skills good. Finally, I have been teaching myself Nepali for the past year (as I will be teaching English in Nepal autumn 2009).

The “Linguistics Course”:

The idea was to introduce students to aspects of Language that they had not encountered before, so I tried to design a little unit on comparative linguistics / applied linguistics. Core topics I wanted to touch on were:

  • Universal Grammar / Language Instinct Theories
  • Sapir-Whorff Theory of language’s influence on human thought & perception
  • Nature of writing across different languages: alphabetic, syllabic and logographic scripts (advantages / disadvantages; developments of scripts)
  • Second / Foreign Language Acquisition as opposed to First Language Acquisition
  • Some comparison of syntax / morphology in a few different languages (belonging to both the same and to different language families)
  • Latest developments: Pirahãthe challenges to aspects of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar / Recursion as universal in human language.

Resources:

There were no textbooks as such, but I copied relevant material or relied on material from the following books:

  1. Appel, R. et al. Inleiding Algemene Taalwetenschap. (General introduction to Linguistics).
  2. Cook, V. Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition.
  3. Coulmas, F. The Writing Systems of the World.
  4. Crystal, D. The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language.
  5. Everett, D. Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes.
  6. Hodges M. and Okazaki T. Japanese Kanji Flashcards.
  7. Nakanishi, A. Writing Systems of the World.
  8. Kristeva, J. Language: The Unknown. An Initiation into Linguistics.
  9. Ostler, N. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World.
  10. Roberts, I.Comparative Syntax.
  11. Wolf, M. Proust and the Squid. The story and Science of the Reading Brain.

On-line resources:

  1. - Daniel Everett’s own website.
  2. - Ethnologue encyclopaedia of the world’s languages.