What’s the Use of Linguistics? Pre-Service English Teachers’ Beliefs towards Language Use and Variation
THE RESULTS
Are the effects of exposure cumulative?
Having established support for the hypothesis that exposure to one linguistics course affects students’ beliefs/attitudes, we wondered if such an effect might be cumulative. In other words, we investigated if exposure to more than one course in linguistics had a greater effect than exposure to a single course. Twenty-five students in our sample had completed at least two courses in linguistics (specifically, 19 had taken two courses, five students had taken three courses, and one four). We will refer to this group as “advanced” students. While this is a much smaller sample, corresponding to less than 10 percent of the original sample, it is still large enough to draw a few tentative conclusions.
In the questions concerning AAVE, the advanced students scored slightly better than the overall one-or-more group, although, strangely, in question 18 a greater percentage of advanced students disagreed with the claim that AAVE and SAE are equally expressive. Turning to the grammatical questions, in question (5) the advanced group shows an insignificant increase of more than 3 percent in agreement over the overall group of students exposed to linguistics, but more significantly, the disagreements drop to 44 percent (from a high of 82 percent of the students without exposure to linguistics). In question (10), the agreements go from a low of 6.19 percent in the Pre- group, to a remarkable high of 44 percent in the advanced group. In question (21), the advanced students who agree that a double negative should be corrected drop to 46 percent, contrasted with the circa 82.5 percent of Pre- students who felt it warranted correction. Conversely the number of advanced students who disagree on the same question nearly doubles (8.25 percent pre-, 16 percent advanced; compare with the mere 9.3 percent of students having taken at least one linguistics course).
In some cases the responses of the advanced students are clearly different: for example, in question (16) only about 10 percent of all students agreed with the ludicrous claim that American Indians have trouble learning English given the lack of complexity of their culture and language. In the advanced students, none agreed (although more than 56 percent were undecided). In question (1), only 28 percent of the advanced students agreed that teachers should require formal English in class, contrasted with the almost 66 percent of Pre- students and the 50 percent of students who have taken one course.
Thus we conclude that the effects of exposure to linguistics are indeed cumulative and that more exposure to linguistics courses increases the positive shift in attitudes and beliefs that we have seen for the broader population of students with exposure to linguistics.
