Looking beyond English
In fall 2008, Daniel Ginsberg, an English as a Second Language teacher at a public high school in Malden, Mass., approached MIT professor Wayne O’Neil asking about incorporating linguistics into his curriculum to allow students to compare and contrast English with their native languages. O’Neil’s answer? Such a curriculum doesn’t exist for ESL students — but he’d be happy to help design one.O’Neil, an MIT linguist who has been an advocate of linguistics education in secondary schools since the 1960s, has had plenty of experience developing curricula for both English and science classrooms. But he had never heard of an attempt to introduce linguistics to an ESL classroom — where students’ language backgrounds can be highly varied — so as to help them develop an English vocabulary for talking about language.In Ginsberg’s class, students’ home languages included Cantonese, French, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Mandarin, Punjabi, Spanish and Tibetan — just a...