Conceptions of Language and Grammarlished notion in literature; it refers to novels, shorts stories, poems, and such
sub-genres as sonnets and lyrics. More generally, text types include such cat-
egories as business letters, term papers, newspaper reports, opinion pieces, and
many others, which are characterized by their content, their purposes, their
textual structure, their form of argumentation, and level of formality (Crystal
2003: 200-1). These are often divided into descriptive texts, which have to do
with the location of entities in space; narrative texts, which have to do with
situations and events in time; directive texts, which are concerned with future
activity; expository texts, which explain phenomena; and argumentative texts,
which attempt to confirm or change the beliefs of their readers (Gramley and
Pätzold 2004: 152-5).
Most communities and many individuals around the world are bi- or
multi-lingual; that is, they make use of more than one language. People in
the United States make use of many languages. Some languages, like Navajo
and Hawaiian, are native to the US; others, like Spanish, French, German,
and English, are longtime residents but were brought by colonists; and still
others, such as Thai and Hmong, were brought by recent immigrants.
In all communities, some varieties and languages are favored and others
denigrated. Children whose native language is not respected in the commu-
nity or the school are at great risk of failing in school. Because language is
such an important component, not just of education, but of an individual’s
personal, ethnic, and social identities, teachers must tread a fine line between
their responsibility to teach the standard variety required for social mobility
and respecting students’ native varieties as manifestations of their identities.
Just as every child has a right to expect teachers to respect their sex, ethnicity,
social class, color, and creed, so every child has the right to expect teachers
to respect their language. It is a lot easier to accept linguistic variation if we
understand it and understand our own attitudes toward it. We deal with this
issue in more depth in our chapters on Variation and Usage in Book II.
In the rest of this chapter, we will consider some of the basic ideas about
language that inform this book.
what is a language?.
As teachers of language (which we are, whether we teach linguistics, litera-
ture, ESL, or physics), we need to have a clear notion of what it is that we
teach. Surprisingly, few people have even the most rudimentary conception
of what a language is, even though they use (at least) one in nearly every
waking moment of their lives. Generally we can lead perfectly adequate lives
without conceptions based on serious reflection on important topics. For
instance, we do not need a precise understanding of physical notions such