linguistics or no linguistics?

In our English teaching degree, as in everyone else's in Ecuador, we give two main axis of instruction: language/linguisitics and teaching methdology.

Why does an English teacher need courses in linguistics?  And how technical should these courses be?

Let's take phonology, for example.  At a minimum, it's worth knowing how to read the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word using the phonemic alphabet in the dictionary.  You'd need to understand the idea of syllables and how word stress works.  You'd need to learn the conept of how meaning is transmitted through intonation and how intonation works differently in different languages.

In morphology, it's useful to understand how words can be built from roots and affixes, again, so you can deconstruct a new word.  In English, we don't have much in the way of inflections, but because we have fairly inflexible word order we do need to know the few that we have.

Semantics, pragmatics and discourse are, for many teachers who are used to studying language according to rules of grammar and syntax, a completely new way of seeing language.  It's useful to see how words and even entire phrases are often completely context-dependent for their meaning.  Conversely, it's interesting to note how we don't apply rules of grammar per se, but rather choose the grammar point that best fits the meaning we are trying to convey.

In teaching, you have to know whereof you speak, and knowing the English language isn't enough: you need to understand the magic of language to teach it effectively!