Herb,

I will gladly contribute to your project. I am wondering, though, if 
you can be a little more specific about what you want. Dwayne wrote 
that it's important for students of various majors to know about 
language, but that doesn't address the question of why it's important. 
It's obvious to us, but to not much of anyone else, even comp. 
teachers. The important comp. people here don't care much about 
"grammar" and don't know much about other ways that linguistics relates 
to writing.

One of the things you'll find, I think, is that different linguistics 
professors in English departments (shall we call them LIPEDs? We're 
about as popular as fat) have different ideologies about the goals of 
ling. in Eng. I'd bet virtually all of them want to correct the usual 
popular myths, but as to how and why to teach linguistics content, 
there will probably be a good deal of variation. I teach history of the 
language, for example, but I don't teach much of the technical stuff 
(e.g., details about sound change and morphological change), partly 
because the course has no ling. prerequisite, but also partly because I 
know that stuff will not interest the students. I also think it's 
equally, if not more, important to look at the social contexts within 
which major changes take place, such as contact with other languages 
and the emergence of a class structure in Renaissance Britain.

I don't have my students do phonology problems, for example. They are 
not going to be linguists; complementary distribution, for example, is 
not as useful a concept for them as is the relation of English spelling 
to English phonology and morphology. There are probably other LIPEDs 
who can't imagine NOT teaching comp. distrib.

It'll be interesting to see what kind of commonalities you find across 
different people.

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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