What’s the Use of Linguistics? Pre-Service English Teachers’ Beliefs towards Language Use and Variation
THE PROBLEM
Students in linguistics classes bring with them lots of beliefs and prior knowledge. Because they all come using at least one (usually only one) language, they think they know about language and have folkloristic beliefs that we feel will not serve them well as teachers. It has been noted (Richardson, 1996; Pajares, 1992) that students bring their own beliefsi to class, beliefs that may facilitate, but often impede, learning. These beliefs may come as a result of life experience or as a result of experience with school, including experience with subject matter taught there. Joram and Gabriele (1998) show, for example, how students in an educational psychology class bring with them a set of beliefs about teaching and learning that often hinders learning because, at least in some sense, students think they already know the course content. Joram and Gabriele show how understanding this fact and teaching the class accordingly may lead to small but important shifts in learners’ perspectives. Peacock (2001), following Horwitz (1985), conducted a three-year longitudinal study of teacher trainee beliefs about second language learning. He showed there were marked differences between the beliefs of trainee teachers and experienced teachers as to the roles of vocabulary and grammar learning and the role of intelligence in language learning, and these beliefs tended to change little over time. Peacock claims it is important for trainees to have beliefs that more closely mirror those of experienced teachers, lest the trainees use their own (in this case non-communicative-language-learning-oriented) beliefs once they become teachers themselves.
That’s what some of the literature says about prior beliefs. Perhaps an anecdote from our teaching will serve to more finely point out the problem. On a final essay exam several years ago, in response to a question about African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a student wrote a beautiful answer outlining the structure of the variety and the educational implications of linguistic research on it (in other words, she perfectly regurgitated the book and lecture). At the end of the essay she wrote, “Ha!” which we took to mean, “You can make me say it, but you can’t make me believe it.”
We became interested in the interaction between prior beliefs and what students got out of our classes a number of years ago. In 1996, in order to assess the effectiveness of our courses, we decided to periodically measure student attitudes, and changes in those attitudes, as students became exposed to core linguistic concepts in our classes.
i In the literature there is considerable confusion over the terms “attitude” and “belief.” Some take attitudes to be solely concerned with affect, and beliefs to be concerned with cognition. In practice, the distinction is very seldom clear, so here we will use the two terms interchangeably.
