Is ‘English’ a language? A brief history of a pointless dispute
Richard Hudson
What does the noun English mean[1]? In ordinary usage there’s no doubt that it’s the name of a language: if I speak, understand or learn English, then what I am speaking, understanding or learning is a language. But put the word into an educational context, and uncertainty sets in. If you teach English, are you teaching a language or a body of literature or culture which happens to be written in English? And when the government describes English as a core subject, does it mean the study of the language or of its literature? It’s not just English that faces these questions: exactly the same uncertainties afflict foreign language teaching, especially at university level. Where does the study of French – meaning of course the French language –fit into the programme of a French department? A BA programme in French or English need not have much to do with the language named in the title of the programme.
A matter of semantics? Yes, but not mere semantics – the ambiguities in these language names really matter. The semantic shift away from the ordinary use of nouns like English and French is the only explanation for the very odd fact (which we all take for granted) that A-level English Language had to include the word language in its title in order to distinguish itself from what was then called simply ‘English’, which had very little to do with the English language. The same is true in universities, where departments have to add the word language to English in order to distinguish themselves from the so-called ‘English’ departments; so if you want to learn about English, you don’t go to an English department but to one called ‘English language’. Similar uncertainties exist in foreign languages, so “‘Modern Foreign Languages’ as a discipline has an identity which is vague and uncertain” (Worton 2009: 8).
The trouble with this semantic take-over is that it sets literature and language in quite unnecessary competition. If the subject called ‘English’ or ‘French’ is really about literature, then the language is at best a side-show; and vice versa. This competition serves no-one. Everyone agrees that the study of English literature is an important part of education, but as long as this study owns the title ‘English’ any increased focus on language threatens literature.The fact is that education needs the study of both language and literature to be strong, and to support each other rather than to be in competition. But putting the two together under a single subject name invites trouble, not least in terms of the expertise needed by an ‘English’ teacher.
The early history
Uncertainty about the place of language seems to have been around for a long time, and may well have its origins in the universities rather than in the schools. Historically, the study of language in our universities was dominated by three dead languages – Latin, Greek and Hebrew – until the nineteenth century, when teaching was expanded to include not only English but also modern foreign languages. I’m proud to say that UCL led the way by including chairs of English, German, Italian, Spanish and even Hindustani among its very first chairs in 1828 (Harte and North 1991: 38). But UCL English was dominated in the nineteenth century by two names: Henry Morley (Professor of English from 1865-89), and W.P. Ker (1889-1922), both of whom specialised in literary history.
Oxbridge was slower off the mark. An important date for Oxfordis 1885, when the Merton Chair of English Language and Literature was created. Even though the chair was ostensibly for both language and literature, there was considerable emphasis on Old and Middle English, so that students had to study large chunks of what was (and is) called‘philology’ to get access to the literature; and the syllabus did not include either Modern English language or even modern literature (Hudson and Walmsley 2005). Literary enthusiasts naturally objected, and won the ensuing campaign against philology. This was led by John Churton Collins, who argued that philology was a science and ‘of all the sciences the most repugnant to men of artistic and literary tastes’ (Collins 1891: 68). What he campaigned for was a separate school for students who wanted to read English Literature without the philological baggage.
This struggle between philology and literature dragged on in Oxford throughout the twentieth century and was only finally resolved in 2000, when Old English was made optional for undergraduates of English. The same conflict shows to this day in the wording on the website of the English Faculty in Cambridge:
The English Faculty was founded in 1919. It was the first Faculty in the country to encourage the study of English Literature up to the present day and the first to approach English literature from a 'literary' point of view, rather than as a manifestation of the history of the language.
Clearly the battle between literature and language-history for the soul of English still arouses strong feelings, and it is noticeable that the ‘English’ Faculty doesn’t claim to include English in its curriculum.
The strong language diverts attention from the main issue: why should the ‘humane’ study of literature be in competition with the ‘science’ of philology in the first place? The only reason for the choice is the semantic uncertainty in the noun English. If this is the name of a language, then a degree in English should surely include the study of that language. It’s only because English is used as short-hand for ‘literature written in English’ that literature is even a candidate for inclusion, let alone for inclusion at the expense of the language.
Moreover, even philology is a poor substitute for a proper study of language. The philology against which Oxford and Cambridge reacted specialised in the study and interpretation of ancient texts and their language – a very dry subject compared with modern linguistics, and a very poor match for the attractions of English literature. But the fact is that the battle took English out of an English degree.
Similar developments took place in other universities, and in other languages, so that by the 1950s most universities offered degrees in both foreign languages and English which were almost entirely free of any study of the modern language.
1964: the turning point
However, the last forty years have seen a major shift in favour of language in the universities. A convenient place to start is 1964. This is the year in which Michael Halliday, newly recruited to UCL by Randolph Quirk, set up his project on linguistics and the teaching of English (Pearce 1994) – a massive project by today’s standards, employing a dozen-strong team for six years, and providing a year’s fully-funded in-service teaching for three cohorts of twenty experienced teachers. The project’s impact seemed small at the time, but it sowed many seeds that have since germinated, so I see it as the major event which triggered a series of other events which explain where we are now. However, I must declare a vested interest as I was a member of Halliday’s team. Although my career continued within mainstream academic linguistics, these three years convinced me that schools and the academic linguistics community need each other more than either side usually recognises (Hudson 2004). Which, I suppose, is why I’m writing this article now, 45 years later.
Halliday’s project is often called the ‘Schools-Council Project’ because its second half was funded by the then Schools Council, though the first three years were paid for by the Nuffield Foundation. Its scale reflects the depth of concern about the state of English education in the early 1960s.
English teaching had just taken the step of officially abandoning the teaching of grammar, which until then had been one of the pillars of English teaching. For instance, the English paper at Ordinary Level had always included an optional question in which pupils identified clauses, explained their relations to one another, and classified selected words. There was a great deal wrong with these grammar questions, but the decision to end them rather than mend them was based on a body of research on grammar teaching which claimed that this kind of teaching was too hard for children (Macauley 1947, Cawley 1957) and in any case had no effect on writing skills. The research has been summarised in many places more recently: Elley and others 1979, Walmsley 1984, Hudson 2001, Andrews and others 2004, Hudson 2005. My view is that it shows that grammar can be taught ineffectively, but not that it can’t be taught effectively.
In the early 1960s the case against grammar seemed to be overwhelming, which is why the grammar questions disappeared from O-level English and grammar was dropped from all official syllabi. As might be expected, the effect on classroom practice was only gradual, and traditional grammar teaching actually continued in many schools for many years; as late as 1975 a survey reported that 82 percent of all 9 year olds spent at least half an hour per week on grammar and punctuation exercises (Philp 1994). These persistent teachers were bucking a strong trend. Disenchantment with traditional grammar was equally strong in other English-speaking countries such as Scotland and the USA, but in England and Wales there was a clearer alternative: ‘creative writing’ and ‘Leavisite’ views of literature as a force for moral and linguistic development. This alternative went with ‘an extreme antipathy to anything remotely connected with grammar teaching – a state of affairs commented upon by a group of American teachers who toured Britain in 1968’ (Philp 1994:1129).
How had grammar teaching earned itself such a dreadful reputation? No doubt there are many explanations, but I’m sure at least part of the blame lies with the universities. English teachers were graduates, but as I have just explained, all their undergraduate training was in literature. British universities did not research English grammar, so modern English grammar (as opposed to that of Old English, which some undergraduates learned) had never been part of the undergraduate curriculum (Hudson and Walmsley 2005); and in consequence, grammar was transmitted from one generation of school teachers to the next with little or no input from professional research. Nobody seemed to have a clear idea of what it was for, or even what it was – in 1921 a report concluded that ‘[it is] impossible at the present juncture to teach English grammar in the schools for the simple reason that no-one knows exactly what it is’ (Board of Education 1921: 289f.). No wonder it was so easy to persuade all concerned simply to abandon the whole enterprise as a waste of time.
However, in spite of the certainties about the failure of grammar teaching and the attractions of creative writing and literature, there was still considerable uncertainty about how best to teach reading and writing skills. Official reports suggested that language standards were falling in universities and that the educational system was failing the children in its care (Hudson and Walmsley 2005). It is hard in retrospect to evaluate these warnings, but the fact is that government and other sources were willing to explore alternative approaches in which teaching about language played a more central part – such as the Schools-Council Project mentioned above.
This project was the brainchild of two members of the small but growing band of UK academics who had started to show enthusiasm for the new subject of linguistics which had been growing fast in the USA for some decades. Randolph Quirk (now Lord Quirk), a visionary at UCL, was campaigning for a more enlightened approach to the teaching of English language (Quirk and Smith 1959,Quirk 1962). He recruited Michael Halliday to UCL, and between them they persuaded the Nuffield Foundation to fund this research project on how linguistics might affect the teaching of English.
The rest of this history is about the interplay between two forces. On the one hand we have the death of grammar teaching in most (though not all) English classrooms, and how this affected the teaching not only of English but also of foreign languages. On the other hand we have the birth of a rather different activity which can be traced back to the Schools-Council Project, and which we might call ‘language study’.
1990: the National Curriculum and A-level English Language
The 1970s and 1980s saw the spread of a network of ideas that can be attributed in some way to the Schools-Council Project, and which define the new ‘language study’. Perhaps the most important of these ideas is laid out in the introduction to an influential work-book published by the Project (Doughty and others 1971), and centres on the term ‘awareness’. The new aim of English teaching is to build on the language that children already have, and to ‘work towards a much more developed awareness of the part which language plays in the lives of men and society, and the means it has for playing it’ (p. 9). In short, children should learn how language works - not just how literary experts achieve sophisticated effects, but how ordinary people achieve ordinary effects with ordinary language.
This idea appealed to a lot of school teachers, and led to three distinct developments in English schools: language awareness, A-level English Language, and knowledge about language.
Language awareness is the ‘awareness’ advocated by the Schools-Council Project, but extended to embrace foreign languages as well as English. It was the brain child of Eric Hawkins, a teacher-trainer who was inspired by Halliday’s project to suggest that foreign-language teaching should include explicit reflection on language – the learner’s first language as well as other languages (Hawkins 1987, Hawkins 1999). This idea of ‘language awareness’, conscious knowledge about how languages work, has proved very influential among foreign language teachers: it now has its own international association and journal, and it has been adopted in all but name in the official curriculum for foreign language teaching in England. Passages like the following (from the Framework for KS2 Languages) are typical.
When learning a new language, children reinforce and reinterpret knowledge and understanding gained in learning their first language(s). They develop insights into the nature of language and its social and cultural value. Building on their experience of interaction with and in the new language, they begin to increase their understanding of how language works. They compare the new language with English or another language and reflect on similarities and differences. They become aware of rules or patterns in language and begin to apply their knowledge when creating new language. (Anon 2005: 9)
A-level English Language, in contrast, proved extremely popular with English teachers, and is now recruiting over 20,000 candidates per year[2]. As with language awareness, it had its intellectual leaders, in this case two of them: George Keith and Denis Freeborn, who worked respectively with the exam boards based on Manchester and London and were both influenced by the Schools-Council Project. The challenge for both of them was how to produce a non-literary syllabus suitable for teachers who were trained in literature, so compromise was essential, and continues into the new syllabus produced by merging their two syllabi. The main concession to literature-trained teachers was to focus investigation on texts rather than on the underlying linguistic system. Pupils learn to compare texts of widely different types, and to comment on their distinctive characteristics; if the teacher wants, they can explore (say) the tense-system or the vowel-system of English, as they would in a course on pure linguistics, but the marking system means that they don’t have to do this. This compromise clearly works in terms of pupil and teacher satisfaction, but there remains a tension between the relatively formal demands of the syllabus and the lack of formal knowledge of many teachers.
Knowledge About Language, or KAL, means explicit knowledge about language, in contrast with the implicit knowledge of language that every native speaker brings to school. It is like ‘language awareness’, but with the focus on explicitness and metalanguage rather than on language comparison. KAL became an integral part of official statements about language after a series of government reports in the 1980s starting with English 5-16: Curriculum Matters 1 in 1964 and ending with the Kingman report in 1988 and the Cox report the following year, which prepared for the new National Curriculum for English in 1990 (Carter 1994). KAL requires systematic teaching about the language and its structure – a step beyond what the Schools-Council Project recommended in their workbook, Language in Use:
Language in Use does not require pupils to make detailed and explicit analytical statements about the topics which the units explore; consequently the development of awareness does not entail the the learning of a body of facts about language. (Doughty and others 1971: 9)