Publisher's Synopsis
Language is at the heart of language teaching and learning and teachers need to constantly reflect on what language is. This is because our understandings of language affect the ways we teach languages. Histories of linguistics often copied from one another, uncritically repeating popular but inaccurate interpretations; they also tended to see the history of linguistics as continuous and cumulative, though more recently some scholars have stressed the discontinuities. Also, the history of linguistics has had to deal with the vastness of the subject matter. Early developments in linguistics were considered part of philosophy, rhetoric, logic, psychology, biology, pedagogy, poetics, and religion, making it difficult to separate the history of linguistics from intellectual history in general, and, as a consequence, work in the history of linguistics has contributed also to the general history of ideas. Still, scholars have often interpreted the past based on modern linguistic thought, distorting how matters were seen in their own time. This volume provides state-of-the-art overview of the nature, origins, and current concerns of the field of linguistics. The volume addresses the questions of what constitutes the knowledge of language, and how this knowledge is acquired and used. The understanding of language that is part of our stance also affects what happens in the classroom and the ways in which learners begin to understand the relationship between their own languages and the languages of their learning. If the language learning program focuses on the code, then it models a theory of language in which the relationship between two languages is simply a matter of code replacement, where the only difference is a difference in words. This work contains state-of-the-art overviews of a variety of aspects of language awareness and the role of metalinguistic knowledge in language development and education. This book provides a re-conceptualization of grammar in a period of change in the communication landscape and widening disciplinary knowledge.
