29.4883, Review: English; Applied Linguistics; Historical Linguistics: Hayes, Burkette (2017)

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Subject: 29.4883, Review: English; Applied Linguistics; Historical Linguistics: Hayes, Burkette (2017)

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Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2018 10:30:21
From: Corey Zwikstra [corey.zwikstra at washburn.edu]
Subject: Approaches to Teaching the History of the English Language

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-4038.html

EDITOR: Mary  Hayes
EDITOR: Allison  Burkette
TITLE: Approaches to Teaching the History of the English Language
SUBTITLE: Pedagogy in Practice
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Corey J. Zwikstra, Washburn University

SUMMARY

This edited collection includes 29 essays on the teaching of the history of
the English language (HEL), offering a range of approaches and a wealth of
practical suggestions. Contributors are mostly senior scholars of English or
linguistics with the requisite publications and experience. Most work in the
USA, with others in the UK, Canada, South Africa, and Finland. Their expertise
and experience help the volume succeed in mapping how the history of English
is and might be taught in the twenty-first century.

In their introduction, editors Mary Hayes, a medievalist, and Allison
Burkette, a sociolinguist, remark on the interdisciplinary expansiveness,
chronological scope, variety, and complexity of HEL and on the difficulty of
teaching HEL to students with different backgrounds, abilities, interests, and
goals. Though challenging, it remains an important subject full of
opportunities and rewards. No teacher can master everything, and so these
commissioned chapters focus on practical pedagogy, giving examples, anecdotes,
suggestions, and advice, and providing description or theory as needed.

Six parts structure the book. Part 1, “Reflections on Teaching the History of
the English Language,” contains 4 chapters. In “German, Handwriting, and Other
Things I Learned to Keep in Mind When Teaching the History of English,” John
McWhorter shares lessons learned from mistakes made teaching the class as a
bit of an outsider: make HEL, especially its Old English components,
meaningful to today’s students through participation and practice, and focus
on writing issues since students think of language more as written than
spoken. He also successfully began class periods with etymologies and suggests
HEL teachers not spend too long on World Englishes, which can potentially
devolve into lists that bore students. Thomas Cable’s “Restoring Rhythm: An
Auditory Imagination of the History of English” stresses that contrary to
students’ expectations, HEL should involve imagination and performance,
focusing not on charts of sound changes but playfully on the “auditory
imagination” and the diverse and changing sounds, rhythms, and music of the
language. Rajend Mesthrie’s “Teaching the History of English: A South African
Perspective” explains a crash-course that teaches students Old English, Middle
English, and Early Modern English through language lessons coming from set
texts in each period, with built-in repetition of material to reinforce
grammar. He notes that traditional HEL courses are inadequate. Language
courses inevitably involve social and political questions about identity and
belonging, and HEL courses must therefore include topics such as creoles that
problematize neat historical narratives in authentic and productive ways. In
“How Is HEL Relevant to Me?” Sonja L. Lanehart reminds us of the diverse
interests of contemporary HEL students. Her HEL course prioritizes students’
personalized goals and self-regulated learning. She facilitates their progress
and gives occasions for them to connect the course to their goals and lives,
with lots of activities and practice. Emphasis, she asserts, should be on
skills and continuous learning, not on historical linguistic facts.      

Part 2, “The Value of Teaching the History of English: Rethinking Curricula,”
contains 3 chapters. Matthew Giancarlo’s “Philology, Theory, and Critical
Thinking Through the History of the English Language” argues that old-school
philology and new-school theory can work together to benefit HEL students,
particularly in areas of critical inquiry and knowledge construction. Students
learn that HEL is not merely a body of knowledge but “a mode of
knowledge-creation” (p. 64). Such theoretical mindedness allows students “to
use the concepts of theory to establish an overall pattern of self-reflexive
critical engagement” (p. 66). In “The History of the English Language and the
Medievalist,” Seth Lerer explains that HEL has sometimes been turned into a
legend, with a focus on origins and change over time, appropriately taught by
medievalists. He investigates these associations to argue that literary and
linguistic history are connected. Ultimately, as medievalists themselves have
had to change with the times, so too should HEL, opening to other kinds of
teachers with more varied approaches to the subject. Michael R. Dressman’s
“English and I: Finding the History of the English Language in the Class”
suggests that HEL instructors use to advantage the language histories that all
students, especially non-traditional ones, bring to class with them. Early in
the course, he assigns a thirty-minute diagnostic “English and I” essay in
which students describe their individual relationship with English and reveal
what they hope the course includes. Instructors can use such essays and
similar types of personalized assignments throughout the semester, but
especially early on, to help students get comfortable with the subject,
connect to the material, and achieve their personal goals.        

The longest section in the book, Part 3, “Research Paradigms and Pedagogical
Practices,” contains 6 chapters. In “Historical Pragmatics in the Teaching of
the History of English,” Leslie K. Arnovick describes the hybrid field of
historical pragmatics (meaning in use in contexts over time) and explains ways
instructors might incorporate it into HEL courses. Students, already users of
language in context, could thus gain perspective and practice analyzing
written texts using digital historical corpora and other new technologies.
Graeme Trousdale’s “Using Principles of Construction Grammar in the History of
English Classroom” recommends the principles and methods of construction
grammar (conventional pairings of forms and meanings) to help students
understand elements of language change typically taught in a HEL course. Using
these methods, students analyze large data sets to recognize recurrent
patterns and see variations. In “Addressing ‘Emergence’ in a HEL Classroom,”
William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. applies a term more familiar in science and
economics to the study of language as a complex system in which various
patterns emerge and re-emerge, without specific causes or controls, as users
participate in a history that changes. He says HEL teachers must teach the
contingencies and variations that arise in language because of social factors,
not focus on normalizing or top-down processes that promote a teleological
history of Standard English. This approach shows students how delightfully
messy English has always been on the ground when used by real, social human
beings. Jukka Tyrkkö’s “Discovering the Past for Yourself: Corpora,
Data-Driven Learning, and the History of English” extols the use of corpora
but suggests they have been underused in teaching HEL. A corpus-linguistics
approach to HEL in the classroom reveals that diachronic variation is complex
and always ongoing and must be studied alongside synchronic variation.
Students need to work with data first-hand and consider their approaches to
those data, imitating real research and learning and discovering on their own.
“Word Classes in the History of English” by David Denison also champions the
use of corpora in teaching HEL, here with an emphasis on parts of speech and
morphology. He, too, asserts how students must learn for themselves by using
data on their own and testing or challenging received wisdom. Michael Adams’s
“Dictionaries and the History of English” proposes the utility of looking at
dictionaries, as well as in them, to learn about HEL. Such an act of seeing
connects internal and external linguistic history and several disciplines,
insofar as dictionaries are material cultural artifacts, as well as
repositories of linguistic information. Instead of writing traditional term
papers, students might write etymologies or word histories or compile
annotated glossaries. Again, students in the contemporary HEL course might do
original and personally meaningful research, not merely regurgitate facts and
others’ opinions.         

Part 4, “Centuries in a Semester: HEL’s Chronological Conventions,” contains 4
chapters. Timothy J. Pulju’s “English Is an Indo-European Language: Linguistic
Prehistory in the History of English Classroom” ponders how much Indo-European
an HEL instructor should include. A necessary inclusion, rather than
historically dumped at the beginning of the course Indo-European should be
spread throughout in the context of several aspects of the language, for
example, the past tense of strong verbs in contemporary English. In “Serving
Time in ‘HELL’: Diachronic Exercises for Literature Students,” Mary Hayes
relates how focus on a diachronic textual tradition, here different
translations of Psalm 22, helps students manage the vast historical coverage
of the course and problematize traditionally oversimplified periodization.
Haruko Momma’s “What Has Beowulf to Do with English? (Let's Ask Lady
Philology!)” uses the familiar but often misunderstood poem Beowulf, and
contrasts the writings of scholars Samuel Johnson and John Mitchell Kemble, to
describe advances made by nineteenth-century philology in changing our
approach to HEL. Joan Beal’s “Starting from Now: Teaching the Recent History
of English” follows the pioneering approach of Barbara Strang (A History of
English 1970) in teaching HEL backwards, suggesting that focus on recent
English helps students learn HEL, piques their interest, and if done properly
gives them transferable workplace skills.          

Part 5, “Including ‘Englishes’ in the History of English,” contains 7
chapters, the most of any section in the collection. Benjamin A. Saltzman’s
“From Old English to World Englishes” wonders how medievalist teachers of HEL,
who typically deal with the linguistic past and with the dead, can do justice
to contemporary World Englishes. We must be careful since the teaching of
World Englishes carries “complex ethical weight” (p. 245), wrapped up as the
subject is in contemporary politics and the fortunes of living people. He
proposes a course concentrate in some detail on one specific variety of World
English, instead of hastily surveying all varieties, and begin and end with
World Englishes, not just end with them. In “An Ecological Account of the
Emergence and Evolution of English,” Salikoko S. Mufwene stresses that
“language contact ecologies” (p. 253) are too often ignored and English is too
straightforwardly considered Germanic. He shows that a more accurate
understanding of HEL emerges if we study English as a creole, examining the
influences of external history on internal language history and change. Carol
Percy’s “Researching World Englishes in HEL Courses: Neologisms, Newspapers,
and Novels” also considers how World Englishes fit into HEL. She tends to take
a thematic approach and to give students assignment options that can be
readily applied to elements of World Englishes, for instance, in newspapers,
novels, even movies. She, too, encourages students to critique materials as
they work. Rakesh M. Bhatt’s “Situating World Englishes into a History of
English Course” notes that because English has proliferated globally among
non-native speakers it has become “pluricentric” (p. 274): We have English
languages, rather than the English language. This change has seriously
affected the study of HEL. Today’s World Englishes demonstrate much variety,
innovation, and creativity in their respective contexts, often taking
precedence over Standard English. Accordingly, HEL students learn that English
has many voices, many identities, and many standards, not one universal norm
applicable to all everywhere. Allison Burkette’s “Incorporating American
English into the History of English” recommends targeting a theme or two to
manage the large subject of HEL. Her example themes are contact and
persistence, which have enabled her to successfully connect aspects of
American English, and its varieties, to broader HEL narratives and concerns.
In “Teaching Diversity and Change in the History of English,” Rob Penhallurick
suggests diversity comes naturally to HEL and highlights the importance of
dialects and other kinds of linguistic variety. In the classroom, he
frequently begins with real examples before moving on to theories and
explanations. One assignment exposes students to a text, written or oral, and
asks them: Is it English? Matthew Sergi’s “Our Subject Is Each Other: Teaching
HEL to ESL, EFL, and Non-Standard English Speakers” states that to teach
students more about English we must first make them less familiar with it.
What they know, or think they know, because of overfamiliarity might not be
the whole story. Such a defamiliarizing approach creates a classroom
environment where non-native and non-standard speakers of English feel more
comfortable and are even in positions of expertise and authority regarding
language variation. These students, whose numbers are growing and who often
struggle, have a lot to offer a HEL classroom. Using various student-centered
assignments, Sergi “encourage[s] students to speak up about and talk back to
HEL” (p. 314) through use of multi-vocal examples of the language, critiques
from various perspectives, and consideration of HEL as “a history of conflict
and power” (p. 315).              

The final section, Part 6, “Using Media and Performance in the History of
English Classroom,” contains 4 essays. Jonathan Davis-Secord’s “Approaching
the History of English Through Material Culture” grounds HEL in material
culture to prevent it from becoming overly abstract and so off-putting and
confusing to students. He writes, “Manuscripts give the students something to
hold onto—literally, conceptually, and metaphorically—which then helps them to
process the linguistic abstractions necessary for understanding the history of
English” (p. 328). Various educational theories support such grounding of the
abstract in the physical. Students work with manuscript texts in hands-on,
practical ways, and these activities can be duplicated for more modern periods
in HEL with printed books, including the assigned textbook. David Crystal’s
“Teaching Original Pronunciation” indicates new interest in the reconstruction
of historical pronunciations. An experienced consultant and coach in this
area, Crystal relates how methods used to teach actors reconstructed
Shakespearean English might be adapted for other older-pronunciation projects,
including those that might inform HEL assignments or classes. In “Engaging
Multimedia in the HEL Classroom,” Natalie Gerber gives the perspective of a
modernist who teaches HEL. Through trial and error, she learned that the use
of podcasts and other multimedia sources such as television improved and
humanized students’ learning, enjoyment, and general engagement with the
course. These media sources are fundamental to the work of the course, not
mere supplements or fun digressions. Philip Seargeant’s “Teaching the History
of English Online: Open Education and Student Engagement” notes that today’s
educational landscape has shifted with the advent of online education and open
access materials. He explores the teaching of HEL in such contexts, giving as
an extended case study the online video series ‘The History of English in Ten
Minutes.’ Such multimedia texts have the potential to reach and engage large,
non-traditional audiences interested in the subject. At their best, these
texts can be both entertaining and rigorous, and they may encourage viewers to
become more expansive and critical in understanding HEL and perhaps compel
them to seek more formal education in the subject.  

As a sort of conclusion, the editors provide an “Appendix: Resources for
Teaching,” an annotated list of thirty books of a rather general nature that
could be adopted as textbooks or used as supplemental materials in teaching
HEL classes. Brief guidance and evaluations are provided concerning audience
and pedagogy. Notes to the respective chapters follow the appendix. There is
an extensive bibliography and a usefully detailed appendix.     
 
EVALUATION

This is a welcome and needed collection that achieves its intended goals and
will serve its audiences well in practical terms. 

Implicit dialogues and conversations permeate the book and help it cohere. For
instance, Saltzman’s idea that a HEL course focus in detail on one variety of
World English responds nicely to McWhorter’s concern that covering too many
varieties may result in boring lists. Mesthrie and Mufwene speak together on
the necessity of teaching about creoles in teaching the history of English.
Davis-Secord and Adams agree on the effectiveness of a material approach to
English using manuscripts and dictionaries as objects that engage students and
connect linguistic and social history. Like Beal, Sergi works backward from
contemporary English, and like Bhatt he helps students see the perennially
pluricentric nature of English. Similar to Lerer’s essay, Hayes’s approach
allows students to see literature as language. And like the essays by Tyrkkö,
Denison, and Adams, her essay foregrounds students learning by doing for
themselves, with structure and guidance provided by the instructor. World
Englishes inform many conversations in the collection, as do essays about
technological tools such as corpora and multimedia (Gerber and Seargeant).
Mufwene is not a lone voice in advocating for skepticism and critique of
received opinions and for a more complex and political understanding of HEL.
Several contributors (McWhorter, Davis-Secord, Gerber) admit to learning
successful techniques for teaching the subject after having made mistakes.
Readers will find many other points of contact across the collection. One
paramount conversation nearly all essays are having is this: Contemporary HEL
courses must focus on the student, not the subject. HEL courses, like most
successful courses, are about what students do and learn, not what teachers
teach.  

Currency and variety recommend the volume. One learns how HEL is taught today.
Several authors emphasize that it cannot and should not be taught the way it
used to be. As the many chapters on World Englishes and new technologies
attest, the English language and the social worlds it participates in have
changed and so should the teaching of HEL. The book reiterates that today’s
students need relatability and tailored instruction as they learn and must (to
use the buzzwords) engage in active learning and acquire transferrable skills.
Historical and technical content knowledge presented in only one way will no
longer do, if it ever did. Other major strengths of the book are its variety
of viewpoints and the wealth of its suggestions. These make it a deep pool of
resources into which HEL teachers can dip to adopt, adapt, or avoid as needed.
In its multiplicity, the book highlights and responds to the challenges of
teaching HEL due to its complex and ever-widening subject matter and the
diverse students who take the course for various reasons. While no HEL course
can be all things to all students, this collection enables teachers to make it
more things to more students. As for weaknesses, some readers might want more
examples and strategies for teaching technical points of the internal history
of English. It is perhaps in these areas that many teachers today feel less
well prepared. At times big-picture views, those about language diversity and
Word Englishes, for instance, seem more than well represented and perhaps
presentist.  

While many HEL textbooks and popular books on the history of English exist,
there are not many books on teaching the subject. What pedagogical help there
is often hides in various teaching journals, unlikely to be found by most
instructors. As the subject is commonly taught, most importantly perhaps to
future English teachers, in differing institutional contexts, such a
practically minded book fills a gap and will be profitably used by many. Most
essays are quite readable, rarely getting mired in jargon, technicalities, or
abstractions that would work against the volume’s serving as a teaching
manual. (Giancarlo’s essay might be an exception.) The essays share stories,
provide contexts, describe approaches, and above all suggest tested examples
of classroom tasks and assignments. The collection deserves a wide and
reflective audience. Use of the book will make our classes better and our
students better off.  

In short, this is a sound, readable, coherent, and useful book, stimulating in
practical ways, genuinely pedagogical, and a current representation of many
possible visions of HEL.

REFERENCES

Strang, Barbara M. H. 1970. A History of English. London: Methuen.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Corey Zwikstra is an Associate Professor of English at Washburn University in
Topeka, Kansas, where he teaches a variety of courses on medieval literature
and the English language. Currently he is collecting his thoughts on a
possible book about aesthetics in Old English poetry.





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