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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