Alternative Intro Ling courses

[Charles C Rice]

Looks like a good outline for a textbook, Johanna.

There's one that resembles your outline a bit, Introducing Language in
Use, by Bloomer, Griffiths, and Merrison. They have the usual chapter on
pragmatics, mostly Grice, but it is preceded by a chapter on Conversation
Analysis and followed by one on power and politeness. The drawback is that
it is British, so most of the example are suited to a British audience. 

Have you looked at Curzan and Adams, How English Works? The benefit of
that one is that it focuses on English more specifically. You lose the
dimension of cross-linguistic comparison but they can therefore squeeze in
topics more specifically oriented to American English--more details on
dialects, discussions of classroom issues, history of English. 

Clai Rice


> -----Original Message-----
> From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [mailto:funknet-
> bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of Johanna Rubba
> Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2010 5:00 PM
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Subject: [FUNKNET] Alternative Intro Ling courses
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Is anyone else out there looking for a textbook for intro linguistics
for
> non-majors that does not take an exclusively generative line? Does
anyone
> know of books that deal primarily with aspects of language that are
> practically useful for non-majors? Well-educated citizens need to know
> about things like language/dialect prejudice, myths concerning bilingual
> education, myths concerning first-language acquisition, some information
> about language history and the history of English, the horrendous state
of
> grammar instruction in our schools, the fakeness of "language experts"
> like John Simon, propaganda techniques, results of critical discourse
> analysis concerning things like racism, sexism and heterosexism,
language
> policy, the role of frames/schemas in everyday life, pragmatics and
speech
> acts, a deeper understanding of semantics beyond entailment,
implicature,
> semantic features, utterance vs. sentence meaning, and the "nyms," the
> role of information flow in discourse structure, and perhaps a basic
> understanding of how linguistics can be applied to the study of
literature
> (for English majors, at least; most of my intro students are English
> majors).
> 
> I know that a number of these topics are covered in existing textbooks,
> but a number are not. Also, existing textbooks do a poor job of
addressing
> the lexicon, if they address it at all. The work that has been done on
the
> network model, usage-based models, prototypes, categorization, and the
> role of schemas/frames in word definition are lacking in most textbooks
> (some allude to prototype theory, but very cursorily).
> 
> Intro textbooks, even those that advertise themselves as being for non-
> linguists, such as Parker & Riley's _Linguistics for non-linguists_ and
> Denham and Lobeck's _Linguistics for everyone_, fill their pages mostly
> with the core subjects (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and
the
> poor treatment of semantics described above). They do have a significant
> amount of space devoted to some of the above topics, but I don't think
> teachers can deal with all of them in a single term (and especially not
a
> ten-week quarter, which it is my fate to teach in). And too many
textbooks
> teach generative theory as god's truth; they address counterarguments
> minimally, and often by trundling out old data, like island constraints.
> They bring in data that, from their point of view, prove modularity and
> Universal Grammar, but they never address specifically any arguments
that
> non-generativists make; they simply say that the data (e.g., genetic
> language disability or "linguistic savants") prove their theory beyond
the
> shadow of a doubt. One could easily get the impression that they don't
> think of their theory as theory (whether they intend this or not), but
as
> proven fact, with any challenges not being worthy of their attention.
> 
> People are still writing these textbooks as though we are training
future
> linguists who already have an intrinsic interest in the details of
> language structure. I have ten weeks to give my students their only
> introduction to the scientific study of language. I don't see any point
in
> these students learning to solve phonology problems or draw tree
diagrams
> for a tiny fraction of the sentence types that exist in English. I don't
> see the point of having them learn how to build a linguistic argument
> based on structural data. I'm not even sure how important it is for them
> to understand speech articulation in the detail seen in most intro ling
> textbooks. I'd far prefer that they learn to think critically about the
> language - and language about language - that exists around them. I'm
sure
> this would engage them far more (my most popular course is Language and
> Gender). When I do exit surveys in my classes, I ask for the most
> important single idea they will take away from my course. The vast
> majority of the students respond with something about dialect prejudice.
> Many, many say they will never again judge a person based on the way
they
> speak. There may have been some students who have mentioned learning to
> solve phonology problems or drawing tree diagrams, but I could count
them
> on one hand. Students seem to *want* the understanding of language that
> they *need*.
> 
> It would be interesting to know what most linguists believe is necessary
> knowledge about language for the non-major. Many, many linguists work at
> institutions at which they never train graduate students and have
teaching
> loads and service obligations that severely limit their research efforts
> (like me; I teach nine courses in the typical year, and do an average
> amount of committee work, which I actually like to do). Many of us teach
> only courses that require no previous linguistics training.
> 
> I'm teaching intro ling to English majors in winter quarter (starts
early
> Jan.). I'm going to spend my winter break thinking up field exercises or
> activities that will "sex up" the course. And I'm using Language Files
> 10th edition. Not a great book, but I haven't found a better one for
> undergraduates. Finegan's _Language: its structure and use_ covers a lot
> of the territory I'm looking for, but it's not easily managed on a
quarter
> system, the chapters on phonology and syntax are confusing, and the
level
> may be above what my undergrads can handle.
> 
> Any thoughts, suggestions, practices you'd be willing to share? Or:
Help!
> 
> Best,
> Jo
> 
> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Professor, Linguistics
> Linguistics Minor Advisor
> English Department
> California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
> E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu
> Tel.: 805.756.2184
> Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
> Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
> URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba