Craig points out an important issue, which I believe rests in part on
the kind of graduate education linguists get. Many of these linguists
go on to teach in positions like mine, Herb's, and that of many others
on this list -- teacher-ed courses (probably just one in the whole
teacher-ed curriculum, for most).
Many, if not most, linguistics grad programs follow the generative
tradition, which focuses on how cool theory is. Not much attention is
paid to meaning or text organization except within generative theories
such as formal semantics. There is little interest in the practical
application of linguistics in teacher education; the field as a whole
does not train, encourage, or reward work that many of the people on
this list do. Many introductory linguistics textbooks (many students
take an intro ling or intro to language course for their credential
requirement) continue to present linguistics as though the students are
training to be linguists, for instance devoting whole chapters to
solving phonology problems in other languages. Then you find a few
paragraphs devoted to discourse analysis in a single chapter devoted to
"other approaches" to language. Structure-of-English textbooks do a
much better job, but many of them also devote too much space to
linguistic argumentation and things like syntactic tree diagrams, etc.,
and little space to how language conveys meaning and how structures
serve discourse functions.
At the same time, they acquire the typical linguist's attitude towards
prescriptivism, which is dismissive. Since little attention is paid to
what is actually happening in schools, such as the standardized tests
that require knowledge of prescriptive points like who/whom, they have
little feeling for the problems future teachers face in applying
linguistic grammar in the classroom. They then have to confront this
when they get into a job in an English department. Often they simply
continue to teach according to their graduate training. Not only does
this not serve the students, it helps preserve the hostility of
non-ling. faculty towards linguistics, which they view as an arcane
discipline quite irrelevant to the interests of literature or
composition. I suspect many of these linguists also do not quite grasp
the idea that their students and colleagues are not necessarily
fascinated with grammar for grammar's sake, as they are.
My absolutely most successful course at Cal Poly was a course in which
I taught linguistic analysis of literature, using the excellent book by
Mick Short. Students were amazed to see that they could apply
linguistics in defining authorial style, styles such as
stream-of-consciousness, or analyze point of view via linguistic
signals in a text. They welcomed the idea that you can defend an
interpretation of a text based on the actual linguistic features of the
text. We looked at minimalism in Raymond Carver's stories, and the
application of speech act theory in modern plays, among many other
things. On their course evaluations, students simultaneously said that
the course was the hardest they had ever taken, but that it had served
them better than _any_ of their lit. courses, and that such a course
should be required of every English major (these were grad students, by
the way).
It's telling that Short's is a British book. How many American ling.
grad programs offer a course in stylistics?
Now, my training in non-generative linguistics was also focused
entirely on theory, but because it was a meaning-based approach, I
found it easier to incorporate its principles into teaching about
language. Unfortunately, I had little training in functional syntax and
discourse analysis, and am having to try to educate myself in that
while I try to handle my heavy workload. Nevertheless, I am
incorporating applications of ling. to literature, education, and
everyday language into a ten-week course! Quite a challenge!
Ed is too hard on the linguists on this list. Why do we belong to such
a list? I believe most of us are here because we have a strong interest
in improving grammar instruction K-12. Frankly, the problem of
methodology for these levels has only recently been addressed. And we
face the problem of trying to formulate this while we teach college
students. Any of us teaching at non-R1 universities have heavy
workloads and are hard-pressed to find support to do classroom-based
work. In order to publish in our field at the level required to get
tenure, we often have to submit to journals that will not publish such
practical material as finally creating a linguistics-based grammar
curriculum. (See above remarks on lack of support for education-related
work in the linguistics community.)
Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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