by Dr Sally Zacharias (LKALE treasurer)
This year, the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) annual conference was hosted by the University of Glasgow and being on the organising committee, I was lucky enough to attend some talks that focused on language awareness in schools, disciplinary literacies and language in the curriculum. The following is a snapshot of just some of the exciting work that is currently going on in these areas, which align with our SIG’s own activities and vision.
Dr Rosamund Mitchell (University of Southampton) in her talk ‘Curriculum reform in the UK: The place of language’ provided a useful overview of and comparison of the English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish curricula that differ in how language awareness/knowledge about language is understood and implemented. She looked at a number of key themes: top-down vs bottom-up curriculum control; curriculum breadth and depth; the knowledge-skills relationship; interdisciplinarity; assessment and accountability. In this talk, and also in her second talk at the Committee for Linguistics in Education (CLiE) roundtable, she open the discussion on how applied linguistics can contribute to opening up the language curriculum and how understanding these different perspectives can facilitate discussion between researchers and practitioners from different geographical regions of the UK.
As part of the relatively new Language Curriculum SIG in BAAL Dario Banegas (University of Edinburgh) in his talk ‘Applied linguistics and language teacher education curricula for challenging times’ opened up the discussion on curricula content from a global perspective by asking what role applied linguistics plays in the preparation of language teachers in undergraduate as well as postgraduate courses to address current challenges and needs. His talk highlighted how in some contexts, areas such as sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, second language acquisition, systemic functional linguistics, and raciolinguistics play a far larger role in addressing current challenges and needs, whereas in other contexts, more constrained views of language as a discrete, formal system with no attention to language as social practice underpinned the curricula.
This year, there was also a strong presence of researchers working on disciplinary literacies in both UK mainstream contexts and Content and Language Integrated Learning contexts. David Beauchamp (University of Bath, United Kingdom) and Dana Therova University of Bath, United Kingdom introduced in their talk the Disciplinary literacy & corpus-based pedagogy (BAWESS) project that is investigating the disciplinary literacy writing development in exam years and developing teaching resources to support writing for high-stakes exams for English as an Additional Language learners in the UK. Some of the key questions that the project aims to address are: What discipline-specific features are found in student writing within and between disciplines across the secondary school exam years? What is the nature of disciplinary variation of generic structures of exam responses in secondary school high-stakes exams? And finally, how can the findings be utilised to target areas for writing improvement across different student demographics, such as EAL students? They highlighted how their intention is to capture the insights from this project to enhance teachers’ knowledge of discipline-specific language and show how they can support EAL learners to develop their writing during their exam years.
Julia Huettner (University of Vienna) in ‘Students’ linguistic production in CLIL history, physics and English texts: how does it relate to English teacher assessments?’ looked at how she and her colleagues Ana Llinares (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain), and
Christiane Dalton-Puffer (University of Vienna, Austria) are currently working on a project which studies secondary school students’ performance in the use of English for the expression of content across disciplines (e.g., English, Physics and History) and educational levels in 17 schools participating in the same bilingual programme in different parts of Spain. Their aim is to analyse linguistic realisations of written texts of the students and relate their analysis to English teachers’ assessment of these texts.
In the Committee for Linguistics in Education (CLiE) roundtable Gee Macrory presented an overview of their 2024 submission to the official Curriculum and Assessment Review in England. In a nutshell, their evaluation of the curriculum in England is that it is too narrow and too assessment heavy, limiting the potential of the role of applied linguistics in schools and the power it has to enrich the lives of students. To end, Rebecca Mitchell (University of Cambridge) spoke about her 2024 fantastic project to launch National Linguistics Day on November 26th an initiative to get people of all backgrounds thinking, talking and learning about linguistics.
Despite all the challenges we face, it is encouraging to see that through the drive and passion of individuals, and through the commitment of and collaboration between organisations that applied linguistics can start to address the challenges and needs of those in education.
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Linguistics and Knowledge about Language in Education 