Keith Davidson: linguistics and English education

Keith Davidson, who died recently, combined a deep and passionate knowledge of linguistics with an equally deep and passionate understanding of the teaching and assessment of English. During the 1960s he was a student on the Institute of Education’s diploma programme in Linguistics and English Teaching under Michael Halliday and the IOE English team. Dick Hudson, one of Keith’s tutors, remembers him as enthusiastic and bright, and a joy to teach. IOE lecturers Harold Rosen, Nancy Martin and James Britton were developing a pedagogy of English teaching that took account of the language that children brought with them into school, and Michael Halliday was developing an epistemology of language as social semiotic. It is easy to imagine the élan of this pioneering work in education and linguistics and its effect on the young Davidson, who developed an embodied knowledge of the ways in which children learn language and a corresponding awareness of good practice in pedagogy and assessment. He put this awareness into practice when teaching in further education and for the Open University and in his post as University of London Examinations Officer for GCE English Language. Keith explained linguistics to English educators and English education to scholars of linguistics. He brought together these two audiences in some of his publications. He had a way of informing the imagination of his readers by exploring from alternative perspectives topics in which they did not specialise. “Beyond their GRASP?”, an article published in English Today in 1998, introduced readers of an academic journal on the English language to NATE’s (1997) Position Paper No. 1 on grammar, spelling and punctuation. It brought together two apparently very different worlds: young children at a birthday party and English curricula and examinations. The paper is structured around familiar topics of language in education (speaking, writing, grammar), but Keith starts with the children, four-year-old triplets, two of whom are busy talking about what interests them (the third, Joe, is reading a book). The paper’s subtle linguistic analysis of what the youngsters say is a superb demonstration of how much “unconscious” understanding of the syntactic and phonological systems of language is already evident in children’s speech. It also demonstrates the author’s conscious linguistic understanding of what the children are doing. Tommy, into dinosaurs, is proud that he can say “tyrannosaurus rex”. He treats it “as a single, six syllable, lexical item, assigning the main stress to the final syllable [and] enjoying the alliterative sequence of the syllable initial /r/ feature, if still in a somewhat uncertain version [u]”. There is even, Keith shows, a historical literariness in Tommy’s use of language (as Bakhtin insisted, we are born into a language culture). At the end of the birthday party, Tommy collapses on the sofa, complaining happily: