In this article, I discuss a linguistics course that I have been teaching for the past 3 years in a multiage primary school classroom. This experience has led to work in other schools, has changed the way I teach introductory linguistics courses for teachers, and has led to the development of materials and curricula for use in K-12 classrooms. I hope the sharing of these experiences will help to effect real change in the way in which knowledge about language is taught in K-12 classrooms in the USA.

Linguistics in a Primary School

Abstract:In May 2016, the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America approved formation of an ad hoc AP Linguistics Committee (APLC) to study the creation of an Advanced Placement Linguistics course and examination for US high schools. In January 2017, the APLC convened and voted to proceed with the drafting of a formal AP Linguistics proposal to the College Board and to take whatever preparatory steps were required in that process. In this paper we sketch the AP Linguistics initiative, describing the potential benefits of linguistics for American high schools and their students, the attractions of high school linguistics for the field of Linguistics itself, the motivations for an AP Linguistics course in this context, the formal requirements of an AP Linguistics proposal to the College Board, and the steps being taken to meet those requirements.

The AP Linguistics initiative

0. It has been suggested by a number of linguists (Keyser 1970, Fraser 1974, Hale 1973; 1976) that language could assume a powerful educational role in schools by serving as a data base for teaching the methods and attitudes of scientific inquiry. Hale (1976; 1970-75) has suggested further that this idea could occupy a central position in the educational programs of school systems in communities whose members have knowledge of an American Indian language, and he has suggested various ways in which a program using a local language in this way might be developed. These suggestions are applicable primarily in communities whose children and young adults are fluent in the local language. However, this is not now the case in many American Indian communities where a concern for the local languages is, nevertheless, strongly felt and in which the question of a possible role for them in the formal schooling of the communities' children and young adults is as relevant as it is in fully bilingual, or local-language-dominant, communities.

Teaching Scientific Inquiry and the Winnebago Language

Little Linguists: A model for engaging university students and elementary schoolers in a day camp setting

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Picking Up STEAM: The Role of Languages and Linguistics

The answer depends on what one conceives the study of grammar to be. If one conceives of the study of grammar in the same terms as the theoretical linguist, then surely grammar has no more place in the elementary school curriculum than does the study of quantum mechanics or high temperature physics. Linguistics is concerned with developing a theory to formally characterize the knowledge which a speaker of a natural language possesses. The questions which he asks are questions about formal properties of grammars based upon the facts of a natural language.2 A study of such facts and correspondences can tell him a great deal about the abstract principles according to which natural languages appear to be constructed. One thing which this inquiry will not tell the linguist, however, is how to read better, or write better, or speak better, or listen better. There is little reason to suppose, then, that what linguistics does not do for its practitioners it will do for elementary school children. This is not to say that the subject matter of linguistics is irrelevant to elementary school teaching. It does say, however, that the linguist's concern with language is quite different from the educator s concern with

Samuel J. Keyser

Papers

The Role of Linguistics in the Elementary School Curriculum.