Introduction

A fundamental issue in successfully integrating linguistics into the school curriculum is developing a vision of language and linguistics which is relevant to the needs of school learning. While suitably packaging linguistics for study in primary and secondary education may sound simple, it is far from easy and by tradition academic linguists have not been particularly concerned about engaging with the challenge. However, with the relatively recent emergence and recognition within the discipline of ‘educational linguistics’ and a growing acknowledgement within education and society generally in the US, the UK and Australia of the need for knowledge about language to be an integral part of the school curriculum, it is timely to reflect on what linguistics has to offer of value to education and explore ways in which we as linguists can get the study of language and linguistics into schools. For these reasons, this chapter identifies some of the legacies and considerations in elaborating a viable vision of linguistics and describes one example of such a vision that was collaboratively developed and translated into a senior secondary subject with accompanying textbooks in Victoria, Australia.

The subject VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education) English Language (henceforth EL) is the result of university-based linguists and secondary English teachers working from the ‘top down’ to introduce a new subject into the state of Victoria's curriculum.