Working Notes towards an Agenda for Educational Linguistics

Abstract

There is ample evidence that Educational Linguistics has flourished, over the past 50 years, as an autonomous field of research at the intersection of different areas of linguistics and the educational sciences. Among the various branches of its work, this article - stemming from a conference presented at the 41^st National Meeting of the Portuguese Linguistics Association, at the School of Education and Social Sciences of the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria - focuses on Grammar learning, as explicit knowledge dependent on formal instruction. Following an overview of Educational Linguistics as a specific area of research, the main theoretical tensions of the opening pages of its agenda in Portugal, and in other contexts, will be revisited. Moreover, current issues in Educational Linguistics will be illustrated through a comparison of research strands devoted to the study of metalinguistic interaction. To that end, results are presented from the analysis of dialogues among primary school children, recorded while they were solving problems in a Grammar Lab. The questions guiding this study resonate with international research seeking to understand how “metalinguistic reasoning” develops and what the nature is of the grammatical concepts that emerge in learners’ discourse at the beginning of schooling. The concluding remarks will make room for reflection on what must necessarily be included in the agenda for future intervention in the field of Educational Linguistics.