What happened to knowledge about language?

Hodgson, John

Abstract

Recently, preparing a report for the Committee for Linguistics in Education, I made a content analysis of the linguistic terms used in the Ofsted (Citation2022) Curriculum Research Review for English. The most surprising result of my analysis was the absence of the term “Knowledge about Language”. “KAL”, as it became known, was introduced in the first National Curriculum for English (Cox Citation1989) to signal the importance of linguistic knowledge in English Education. The report noted that in some schools “richer and broader work than we outline is already being done very successfully”:

• Journal Article Type: Editorial
• Acceptance Date: Apr 3, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Apr 17, 2023
• Publication Date: Apr 3, 2023
• Deposit Date: May 25, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 4, 2024
• Journal: English in Education
• Print ISSN: 0425-0494
• Electronic ISSN: 1754-8845
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 57
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 73-75
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2023.2193383
• Keywords: Literature and Literary Theory, Linguistics and Language, Language and Linguistics, Education
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10723655
• Publisher URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/04250494.2023.2193383