In my last blog I showed how Teachers of English as a Foreign Language had abrogated to their profession  the title of Applied Linguistics.

The idea of applying these insights to the language of native speakers of English was squashed for a generation by well-meaning but dogmatic linguists in the sixties, who excoriated Basil Bernstein’s early work which had suggested that the difference between educated and less well- educated pupils in English secondary schools might be a linguistic deficit in the language of working-class children.

Unlike those linguists, I had substantial experience in teaching a mixture of middle and working-class pupils in English secondary schools, and I always thought that it was a shame that Bernstein’s early work was not followed up. Continue reading →

One of the most exciting and useful intellectual developments in the twentieth century was the establishment of the study of language as a science. To distinguish it from the abundance of earlier ideas about language, the modern study was called Linguistics. This consisted, first of all, of a scientific description of the language system – mostly, English. A number of models were developed – Chomsky’s Transformational-Generative Grammar, Pike’s Tagmemics and the one which I found most useful for descriptive purposes, Halliday’s Systemics.

The practical application of the new linguistics was eagerly taken up by teachers of English as a Foreign Language under the title of Applied Linguistics. Continue reading →