In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

774 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) Language and education. By Andrew Wilkinson. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Pp. x, 239. $3.50. Wilkinson poses these questions: (1) What is language? (2) What does language do? (3)How does language relate to thought? (4)How does language relate to learning? (5)How is language acquired ? (6) How does language develop? and (7) How is reading learned ? He suggests that he has answered the last in an earlier book, and he proposes to answer the first six in this volume. To do so, he divides his book into two parts; the first covers just under 150 pages and is presumably intended to give answers to the six questions. The second, which coversjust under 100 pages and is entitled 'Further work', provides extracts from the works of Jakobson, Hockett & Altmann, Sapir, Chomsky, Halliday, Britton, Vygotsky, Whorf, Flanders, Hymes, and Labov; some snippets of Melanesian pidgin and Guyanan Creole; and a few transcriptions of children's speech. The nature of the questions and the plan of the book tend to suggest that W's study is linguistic; but that is not the case. In fact, it is difficult to discover what his approach is. Phonology is barely mentioned; and morphology , syntax, semantics, and language universals are dealt with in some fifteen pages. Whorf and Sapir together get five pages, and both classic and operant behavior are done in five more; finite grammars, phrase-structure grammars, and transformational grammars get about a page and a half each. There is a fair amount of transcription of children's language; some talk about the language of the classroom (the point of which seems to be to establish the generalization that the more the teacher talks, the less the child learns); and quite a lot of talk about linguistic deprivation: 'The debate about whether "working-class language" is inferior or just different from "middle-class language" is insome ways about trivialities, and turns attention away from genuine linguistic privation.' However, one gathers that 'genuine linguistic privation ' occurs largely among the working classes, at least in Britain. Indeed, the book has virtually nothing to do with linguistics, and relatively little to do with language learning or language teaching. It does seem to have something to do with being 'good in English'. The 'linguistics' presented, even when backed up by the more theoretical extracts in the second part of the book, is so much a distillation of the essence that there is no essence left. Technically, the work is weakly edited; e.g., the sample sentences under 6.1.1 are incorrectly numbered, so that the text references which follow require some unscrambling, and a reference to Chomsky on p. 123 dates one of his books in 1900. The bibliography is rather small, considering the range of linguistic topics which the book purports to cover. Though the book was published in 1975, more than 607„ of the citations are dated before 1970; and nearly half of them really have nothing to do with language, language teaching, or language learning. W gives many British references—I had to look up brummte, Romping Molly, and other items—but even aside from that, the references peculiar to Britain do not enhance the clarity of W's argument. This book is both a weak and a dangerous one. In one sense, it could be used as a handbook for future Miss Fiddichs: though its theoretical basis is somewhat modern, it will do nothingto disturb theirlinguisticignorance; it will feed their linguistic biases; and it should serve nicely to convince them (should they need convincing) that their mission in life is to save the British working classes from ' genuine linguistic privation' by teaching them to be 'good in English'. [Robert B. Kaplan, USC] Bilingual education: an international sociological perspective. By Joshua A. Fishman. Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1976. Pp. xiii, 208. The intent of this volume is to provide a perspective for seeing bilingual education in terms of its full range of variability, including regularities that are not self-evident. Bilingual education is essentially an interdisciplinary activity. Psychology, linguistics, and other pedagogically proximate sciences are very relevant in the context of bilingual education. However, they...

pdf

Share