What’s the Use of Linguistics? Pre-Service English Teachers’ Beliefs towards Language Use and Variation
PILOT STUDY
We developed the pilot study in 1996 by examining a number of surveys (chiefly Taylor, 1973; & Shuy, 1970) that covered relevant (or nearly so) areas, and we selected 42 questions pertaining to a variety of subjects. We appended four questions aimed at eliciting some biographical data, such as students’ majors, gender and age range. Most significantly, we asked the students to list the number of linguistics courses they had been exposed to. We collected a total of 172 responses, from courses taught by all three faculty members who were teaching linguistics courses in 1996. The results, analyzed with a statistician and an undergraduate statistics major, were reported in our pilot study (Brown, Attardo, Holcomb, & Badger, 1997). The statistical analysis of the data showed that there was a set of 17 questions that tended to co-vary. That is, while the answers to the other questions are not necessarily useless, those in the set of 17 were significant in the sense that they showed statistically non-random variation as a group. They lumped together. Clearly something was going on.
Since administering a 50-question test had proven taxing for the students and often required an entire class period, we decided to shorten considerably the test by focusing on the questions that accounted for most of the variance in the original questionnaire. Seven out of the 17 co-varying questions pertained to African American Vernacular English or AAVE (out of a total number of 9 questions in the entire survey) and most of the other co-varying questions concerned prescriptivist issues. We added a few more questions to lessen the impression that the questionnaire focused exclusively or primarily on AAVE, thus arriving at the current 27-question version.
