Chapter 6

What's the Use of Linguistics? Pre-Service English

Teachers' Beliefs towards Language Use and
Variation

Salvatore Attardo
Youngstown State University, USA
sanardo@cc.ysu.edu

Steven Brown
Youngstown State University, USA
srbrown.02@ysu.edu

The recent recommendation by Fillmore and Snow (2002) that, given changes in United
States schools, all teachers need to know quite a bit about language has revived old
debates (Menyuk, 1991) about the role of linguistics in educating teacher trainees. The
recent imposition of standardized testing (via the Praxis Test) on the teacher
certification/licensure process has further brought knowledge of language into the
foreground of teacher preparation, insomuch as candidates are being tested on core
linguistic principles. For these reasons, and doubtless more, English (as L1) Education
majors at our university are required to take one of two introductory linguistics courses,
English 2651 (Introduction to Language) or English 3755 (Principles of Linguistics).
The courses used to be fairly different, but recently we have made them the same all but
in name, in part due to the fact that we have been using our own co-authored textbook
(Brown & Attardo, 2000) to teach the classes and in part due to external pressure from
the interested departments. Both courses now cover the same material and are virtually
indistinguishable; technically, the former is required for prospective elementary and
middle school teachers and the latter for prospective high school teachers (and for
English literature majors not on the prospective teacher track). Throughout this paper,
we will make no distinction between the two classes.

The courses meet three hours per week for 15 weeks. The mandate is to teach the
basics of linguistics, with a heavy emphasis on sociolinguistics. Most of the students will
eventually find themselves in public school classrooms. As public school teachers of

N. Bartels (ed.) Researching Applied Linguistics in Language Teacher Education, 91-102.