Linguistics Specialist Group Meeting Wednesday 12th July 2000 CILT, London 

Minutes
1.	General Introductions 
Present: Keith Brown (Chair), Mike Kelly, Dawn Ebrell, Andrew Spencer, Janet Bartle, Jeanine Treffers-Daller, Mike Breen, Dick Hudson, Anne Anderson, John Local, Alison Dickens, Janet Hooper (Subject Centre Evaluator)
Apologies: Peter Skehan, Paul Meara, Ron Carter

2.	Introduction to the Subject Centre (Mike Kelly) 
a.	Review of Subject Centre Objectives
Mike highlighted the following points: 
•	Discrete subject groups most likely to be unified over teaching and learning issues
•	Need to foster/ exploit International links
•	The Centre should establish a framework for initiatives and investments in Learning & Teaching and must achieve the confidence of academic community and funding bodies.
•	Need to locate subject-based supporters of education
 b. Definition of Roles
The following roles for Group Members were highlighted:
•	Identification of initiatives useful for the subject areas
•	Channeling of information to and from subject areas
•	Dissemination of information and good practice– through the information service, workshops etc
•	Cooperation –key. Encourage practitioners to work together to produce a syllabus and achieve a collective direction to the academic area. The role of existing subject organisations should be exploited
•	Promotion of Innovation – to help the Centre to discover and disseminate innovative practice, to identify areas in which we would like to see innovation, find sources of funding, notify funding bodies of funding needs
•	Funding – support for FDTL projects (see attached sheet for info of current linguistics and languages projects). Identification of other sources will be available including local funding

Matters Arising
•	Place of Linguistics  within modern languages rather than in English. It was recognised that this could be a potential source of tension. It was agreed that the Group should work with English on activities etc. Minutes to be sent to English group, possible participation in meetings. 
•	Relationship with consumers (ie students). We must mesh best practice with best experience, ie student experience and to give students a stake in the work of the Centre. PhD students have already expressed a need for a forum to discuss their work in progress (see notes on web pages)
•	The Subject Centre’s relationship to QAA. Subject Centre to act as the glue in the system not as an auditing or policing body, mainly supporting, informing and advising. 
•	Subject Centre and ILT. ILT is the umbrella organisation of the LTSN network but Subject Centres are not part of ILT framework. They would seek cooperation on staff development activities as this relates to ILT qualification, for example advise on subject based teacher-training for certificate of accreditation.
•	Working with other disciplines and Subject Centres – Anne to explore links with Psychology. Crossover workshops will be explored.  Keith to report on Cambridge meeting of Theoretical and Applied  Linguists.

3.	Duties of Group Members  and Subject Centre Activities on which the Group will be asked to advise
The purpose of this meeting  was to work on what we want to be doing and plan actions at the next meeting. The following items were discussed:
Workshops
Funding for 2 free workshops per year, others can be arranged on different funding arrangements. Centre team to advise.
Suggestions for workshops: bolt ons to meetings or conferences (Phonetics network, BAAL, LAGB); working with other projects, e.g.  Mick Short (Lancs) stylistics; Linguistics and Nuffield Report (Eng, FL teaching), FDTL dissemination - Maidment (phonetics); pronunciation in English and Foreign Languages; research feeding into teaching (Salli Tagliamonte, quantative methods for students)
Needs Survey 
Need to find research current activities - web based discussion and brief needs survey. 
Staff and students what are their positive teaching and learning experiences without doing a survey? 
Use BAAL to contact students electronically.
Activate a version of  teachling 
Methodology
Advise on training of PhD 
Benchmarking likely to influence methodology 
Samples of good practice will be collected into a Bank of Case studies including methods and materials
Activities, eg  Linguistics Olympics (Oregan) in which school children invited to compete for the best interpretation of a dataset.
Showcase work in progress on the website
Actions Agreed
1.	To organise immediate-term workshops on subjects of relevance to the discipline
2.	Select correspondence group through mini-survey via HODs
3.	Devise a long-term system for accessing information on the needs of the discipline via a needs survey, the correspondence group (see item 7). What issues are important for students, eg. find out typically taught subjects, ask for urls from correspondants to add to website, ask people what things got the best response from students, and which didn’t, survey PhD students
4.	Establishing a databank – find out what is there and point to it through links page. Case Study Bank
5.	Establish mailbase groups
6.	Contact and liaise with subject organisations  - Mike and KB talking to BAAL and KB talking to LAGB. John Local to talk to BAAP. 2002 next sociolinguistics conference + Essex Peter Patrick (publicity on conf. web pages UWE). Catherine Walters IATEFL, CLIE – Dick to report at next meeting. Anne psycholinguistics electronic newsletter – info about SC

4.	Linguistics and the Nuffield Report (Dick Hudson and Mike Kelly)
A brief overview yielded the following comments:
•	The report will contribute to policy shifts and investments in language teaching
•	There is a change in the role of grammar for English and other languages (e.g The Literacy Strategy)
•	There will be opportunities for linguistics specialists to develop programmes and research to inform and support the learning of MFLs. 
•	Potential sources of funding
•	Recognition of need to shift from study of English only to Language Awareness making use of diverse languages and linguistic experiences. 
•	Strategies to be developed to address lack of teachers 
•	Report is UK-related,  with recognition of Scottish and Welsh situation

An initial workshop has been planned, in tandem with languages on implications of Nuffield report for Higher Education. 

5.	Contents of Web page 
Welcome message which names potential users and suggests ways that they can use the pages. Describes the buttons and asks what we want from them.
Workshops - discussion (work in progress) meetings, presentations, demonstrations, other workshops that are relevant to teaching and learning
Specialist Group - information about the group, minutes of meetings, details of members
Links  - kitemarking could be a problem so we will clarify that we don’t endorse links
Agreement needed on how to check sites that are submitted to the pages. Linguanet model uses named individuals to check websites – no agreement reached on this 
Links to be organised as a two-tier system – collections of links and specific links (Janet to action)
Areas - divisive. To be deleted
News  - news of forthcoming events, online newsletter, bulletins 
Courses (to be renamed, suggestions, please – Studying?) - purpose to highlight institutions offering Linguistics courses with links to the relevant web pages and a database of expertise (collected through needs survey) to enable searching of individual. This will be updated yearly. UCAS currently offers UG list of Q100 
The database will be open.
For graduate courses we will ask for information in the needs survey.
Add Why study Linguistics here?
(Janet to action)
Discussion - lists will be limited to two – Correspondence list (closed) and UK version of Teachling to be open to teachers and students . Invite teachers to “Share your teaching triumphs and troubles”, and students to do likewise. Name agreed - LearnLing). (Ali and Janet to action)
Resources - link to Subject Centre database of resources and CILT pages
Projects  - CILT has a list. Link to research database at CILT
Update on linguistics FDTL (Ali and Janet to action)
Students  - to be replaced by a section for students will be put on home page (which needs to be rewritten and made more welcoming). 
(Janet to action)
Funding – Support for collaborative bids, research into teaching and learning

Items for next meeting 
How to introduce some innovation into the website?
How to cater for the novice lecturer, 6th form student, etc.?
6.	Benchmarking 
Andrew canvassing nominations for benchmarking group 
Role of the Group and the Subject Centre not be part of a regulatory system. Mostly long-term involvement through assisting people in interpreting benchmark statements. 
7.	Correspondence group 
Purpose - to broaden involvement in the Group’s activity 
Group (email) will be invited to contribute comments, items for the agenda etc. 
Recruitment via a short message/potted survey to HODs to request the name of a contact person from each linguistics department
Will emphasise that no one who should be forced to join 
Actions
Suggestions for survey from Group
Ali to coordinate
Relationship to needs survey ask the contacts to help gather data at a later stage
Actions - collect a database of HOD emails (Janet/Ali)
8.	C & IT matters and CILT (Janet Bartle and Dawn Ebrell)
Need to identify more C&IT material for Linguistics
Publishers to be approached for samples and free copies for demonstration
Linguistics materials information sheets are being compiled to contain information relating to organisations, courses, teaching materials, links, using C&IT in linguistics (corpora, translation etc), 
Fliers for conferences can be sent to CILT
Actions 
Dawn will send out a list of items currently available for linguistics and to coordinate suggestions for bibliographic lists
Group to advise on C&IT materials and items for information sheets
An HE section in the CILT library is being developed and should be open in the autumn. It will contain Linguistics, translation etc. books, FDTL materials.

9. Date of next meeting
Friday 20th October 2000 at UCL (details to follow)
Subject Centre launch provisional date 26th September 2000 (details to follow)
Actions
Dick to book room at UCL
Ali and Dawn to confirm launch dates