Guidelines for evaluating school instruction about language

Abstract

This document is a discussion paper commissioned by CLIE - the
Committee for Linguistics in Education, a joint committee of the
Linguistics Association of Great Britain and the British Association
for Applied Linguistics. CLIE tries to make the findings of linguistics
and applied linguistics more readily available to the world of education,
in the belief that many of these findings are relevant and valuable.
The present paper is about the linguistic education of our school
chidren, in the broadest sense of "linguistic" - what children ought to
know about language by the end of their school careers. The paper
does not argue for the inclusion of "linguistics" as an examinable
curriculum subject. That may or may not be a good idea, but it is a
separate issue.