Introduction

In this chapter we set out the subject matter that student teachers encounter in the Knowledge about Language strand of the four-year BA course at the University of Brighton, UK. This course leads to Qualified Teacher Status, entitling graduates to apply for posts as probationary teachers in England's primary schools (TDA 2009c). We show how this content sits in the course as a whole and how it is related to pedagogical issues and to classroom concerns.

Wider background

It is not clear what is the relation of explicit linguistic knowledge to teachers' effectiveness as teachers of reading and writing. In the USA, despite extensive research into reading-teacher education, there is no answer. In a critical analysis published recently in Reading Research Quarterly, eighty-two empirical investigations carried out in the USA, meeting rigorous acceptability criteria, are evaluated by Victoria Risko and colleagues on the Teacher Education Task Force of the International Reading Association (Risko et al. 2008). Not one of them concerns explicit linguistic knowledge. There is one relevant study published in the UK, but it is not recent. This is the Effective Teachers of Literacy project, commissioned by England's Teacher Training Agency and carried out by a team led by David Wray and Jane Medwell at the University of Exeter over ten years ago (Medwell et al. 1998).