ABSTRACT
It is only recently that the term ‘knowledge about language’ has become current and so there is still uncertainty in some quarters about which area it covers and what its relationship is to other aspects of English. It is sometimes assumed that it is just another name for the Latin-based ‘grammar’ taught in classrooms of the past. In fact, it goes far beyond this, uniting the traditionally separated ‘language’ and ‘literature’ by making all the ways in which human beings use language the legitimate subject of study. We are powerfully affected by the language of novels, plays and poems, but also by that of advertising, journalism and political speeches. There is thus some overlap of territory with media education. For example, a primary teacher using a picture sequence to help young pupils plan a story that they will write to fulfil one of the requirements of the National Curriculum for English is using the same technique that a secondary media education teacher calls ‘storyboarding’ and uses to help students make films. Both sets of pupils are making visual representations of the structure of a narrative and what they are doing is demonstrating ‘knowledge about language’, in this case at the level of whole texts.
