We are linguists who have been teaching undergraduate courses on language and linguistics for over 20 years. We teach in both the English department and the linguistics program, and our students include both linguistics majors and English majors (in literature, creative writing, and elementary and secondary education). A prerequisite of our upper division courses is an introduction to linguistics course.

Here, we report on using Fillmore and Snow’s chapter, “What Teachers Need to Know About Language,” in the first edition of this book (Adger et al., 2002) in our upper division English classes, addressing in particular how we have used it to familiarize our students, many of whom are preservice teachers, with the role that knowledge of language, and more specifically, knowledge of language based on scientific inquiry, plays in education. We discuss how we also use the text to raise language awareness among students who may not be education majors, including those majoring in English literature, creative writing, and linguistics. We reflect on how teaching with this text has shaped (and continues to shape) some of our programmatic decisions and aspirations, and we hope that our experiences might inspire readers of this new edition.

Fillmore and Snow make a very clear case for ways in which all aspects of linguistics contribute positively to teacher preparation, in particular in terms of teaching reading and writing, but also in terms of helping students adapt to the language and culture of school. Their approach strongly contradicts the approach popular in schools over the previous decades to reduce teaching about language in English classrooms: Work on the effects of studying grammar (Harris [1962], popularized in the “Braddock report” [Braddock et al., 1963]) suggested that teaching about language directly—the study of English grammatical terminology—was not only not useful but might even be harmful. The impact of these flawed studies was significant. The Braddock report, Eaton (2003: 79) suggests, “arguably began the decline of grammar instruction in the US.