Metalanguage - friend or foe?

I started school in the 1970s when ideas about education were rather ‘hippy’, for want of a better word, and teaching grammar was thought to be old-fashioned and unnecessary. So it wasn't until I studied Linguistics at university that I got to grips with the whole concept of nouns, verbs and adjectives. And it wasn't until I started teaching EFL that my grasp of grammatical terminology more generally gradually filled out - picked up almost entirely from the textbooks I was teaching, often only just ahead of the students I was teaching it to! So I suppose, I have a natural wariness of metalanguage (language to describe language). Coming from a background in which ‘fancy’ terminology seemed both alien and alienating - to me, it was very much the language of ‘posh’ people with a classical, private school education - I felt that people only used it to show off and that it wasn't really necessary, having got on perfectly well without it for so many years.

Since then, my grasp of not just basic grammatical terminology, but the whole mess of metalanguage that surrounds the study and teaching of language more generally has flourished and it's come to feel more familiar, more a natural part of my own vocabulary, so I can now “talk terminology” with the best of them. I'm still acutely aware though that this isn't the case for everybody, and I know that for many of my learners, all those fancy terms are equally as confusing and alienating as they were for me at one time. I certainly wouldn't advocate the slightly weird, listen-and-repeat language learning methodologies that I was subjected to as a child and I can see that it's helpful to have some basic terminology to talk about the subject you're teaching/studying, in this case language. But I'm always wary about letting the terminology get out of hand - after all, the majority of my students aren't interested in language for language’s sake, for most, it's a means to an end.

The issue of metalanguage in the classroom becomes even more evident when you move into EAP (English for academic purposes) and you're suddenly faced with perspective, stance, voice, contextualisation, evaluation, objectivity, subjectivity, criticality, exemplification, citation, signposting, hedging, thesis statements, abstracts, bibliographies ... the list goes on and on and on. For the poor student suddenly having to get to grips with long, dense academic texts, with writing in a very different way, with a new academic culture and with the demands of their own specific discipline, is throwing a whole bunch of extra metalanguage at them, just for the purposes of improving their English, really helpful? Or is it all just part of adapting to the "academic discourse community" (see, I'm quite good at this stuff)? Getting to grips with academic language is all about understanding linguistic labels for abstract concepts after all, so we may as well start them off in the EAP classroom.

Across academia though there's a fine line between terms that are necessary to express subtle, but important distinctions which might be lost by using more everyday language, and unnecessarily complex language that really does nothing more than show off the skills of the writer. So whilst I'm happy to talk to my students about "hedging" because it's an important concept for them to grasp and one not easily expressed in other words, I'm more likely to remind them to “explain the background to a topic” rather than talking about “contextualisation”. It's a fine line to tread though and one I agonise over frequently, both in the classroom and at my desk. How often do I find myself consciously avoiding a term, then to only give up later and include it because it’s getting too messy to explain in other words? Is metalanguage helpful and necessary or just confusing? And how much is too much?

A spot of anthropology

Yesterday afternoon, I took a break from my normal ELT work and spent a couple of hours reading and editing a research proposal for an anthropology project to study the effects of rapid economic growth in Mongolia!  It was sent to me by an old friend who's now a university lecturer in Social Anthropology. The story of how we met is an interesting one and, I realise, our association over the years has probably had more than a passing influence on the work on EAP materials I find myself doing now.

When I first went freelance, some 12 years ago, I looked into using some of my new-found flexibility to do some voluntary work of some kind.  I was living in Cambridge at the time and one of the places I approached was the university's centre for supporting disabled students.  Amongst other things, they put me in touch with a dyslexic anthropology PhD student who needed someone to proofread her thesis. Thus started a relationship which soon turned into a friendship and which has continued ever since. 

When she sent me the first section of text to look at, I couldn't make head nor tail of it! This had nothing to do with her dyslexia, which mostly only came out in odd surface errors like spellings and apostrophes, it was the subject matter and the genre that proved to be a challenge. The terminology and abstract concepts involved in social anthropology were initially completely impenetrable to an outsider.  Slightly daunted, I started off by confining my comments and corrections to surface language issues.  As I read more and became more familiar with the subject matter though, I got bolder in my suggestions, making comments about things that didn't seem clear, maybe needed more context or explanation or reorganizing. By the time she finally submitted her PhD, I'd learnt a huge amount not just about social anthropology and Mongolian culture, but about academic writing as well.

We've stayed in touch over the years and every now and then, she sends me something she'd like me to read through. This time it was a funding application to be judged by a panel of non-academics. As I've been working a lot on EAP materials lately, it was interesting to be viewing it with a slightly different analytical eye.  There were a few surface language points that I picked up right away, but then I got to thinking about how accessible it was for its intended audience.  The short answer is, it wasn't!  Anthropologists seem to be particularly guilty of the common academic tendency to make things sound way more complicated than they really are!  It's an interesting task to try and 'translate' the academic jargon into something slightly more comprehensible.  Part of that job is weighing up when a particular term is just "for show" and can easily be replaced by something more everyday and when it's really needed to pick out a subtle, but important distinction.

All in all, the task provided an interesting challenge, not to mention a welcome change, and sparked a few thoughts and reflections which will undoubtedly feed into my EAP work.  I hope it also helped in a small way to shape the proposal and I'll be keeping fingers crossed that my friend gets the funding she's after!