Final Project Assignment
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When I was first assigned this course, more than thirty years ago, I had no idea of how to teach it except to do the same thing that my professor had done with it when I was in college: plod chapter by chapter through the textbook, tell students to memorize all the many, many details, and leave it to them to put everything into some kind of context.
Needless to say I taught it poorly, and my students suffered exactly as I had suffered through it as an undergraduate. Just as I and virtually every literature major had done, they memorized stuff that made no sense to them, poured as much of the undigested material as they could remember back on tests--and walked out the door after the final exam devoutly praying that they would never have to deal with Grimm's Law or Verner's Law again.
Yes, like almost all English majors of my generation, I came away from my own course in the subject thinking that the History of the English Language was in some way incomprehensible to me summed up in Grimm's Law and Vernor's Law, and that nothing in the course could possibly have anything to do with me or with the literature I intended to spend my career teaching.
But unlike 99% of English majors, my prayers were not answered: I arrived to take up my very first university teaching position to be told that the professor who had previously taught the course had departed suddenly at the end of the summer, and as low person on the totem pole I had been assigned to teach his classes!
Teach them I did, two sections every semester, doggedly, for about two years. And then one day, as I myself struggled to keep in mind the gibberish that I asked my students to memorize...I realized that some of it was not gibberish anymore. Some of it related to things that I had observed the English language doing in real life.
Slowly, over a period of years, I discovered how the material we covered in the course was connected to the literature English majors studied, and to the language they spoke and wrote every day. What I discovered, I incorporated into my teaching. As the years passed, I observed the English language become, through pure accident of history, the most widely spoken language in the world, until today it is the closest thing the human race has ever had to a universal language.
As my perspective changed, this course evolved. Grimm's Law and Verner's Law were pushed far away from center stage, relegated to an important but small unit near the end of the course. I changed the emphasis from the dry technicalities to the living language. What is a living language, anyway? Why does a language have to change or die? What do all languages have in common? What factors cause change? What factors prevent change? In focusing on all those dry, dead technicalities, I had been ignoring the life of our language.
As a result of this change in attitude, I now teach a course that might be called Biography and Psychology of the English Language. Many students don't like this approach, because it demands that they keep thinking, making connections, seeing the relationships between course material and the world they live in from day to day. Although some memorization is unavoidable (the phonetic alphabet, for example, and the specialized vocabulary of linguistics), it has not been possible for many years to do well in this course by memorizing without understanding.
Probably because so many people used to treat this course exactly as I did as both student and novice teacher, it very nearly disappeared from the standard curriculum for English majors in the United States. However, I am certainly not alone in becoming excited by recent studies in Psycholinguistics, Language and Gender, Language and Politics, and all the other fascinating work being done--and realizing that it all applies to the history of our language! Hence the course has made a comeback all over the country, revivified by discoveries in other areas of Linguistics.
The term project for History of the English Language comes from this new vision of the history of English not as something that happened in the past, but that is ongoing, the language evolving as we use it. The project is field-based: students make a recording of real people, often their friends and family, using English as it is used today. They then analyze that sample of real-life language in several different ways. It is not something dry and dead; it is their own family arguing over the dinner table or politicians debating something that affects the students' own lives.
Has History of the English Language become an easy course, then? No, for it still requires a completely different approach than a literature course. Has it become more relevant? How can it not do so, when it now deals with the way our language changes even as we use it? Has it become more interesting? I sincerely hope so--the changes in our language are constant and exciting and important to each and every one of us!
Here are some links to help in the study of the History of the English Language. Most of these pages have links that will lead you to pages with other links that will lead you to pages with other links that....
Have fun!
Thumbnail Sketch of the History of English
World Wide Words
Specialty Dictionaries on the WorldWideWeb
Indo-European Language Tree
Old English Pages: Language
Linguistik Online
American Dialect Society
Gorilla Sign Language Page
Klingon Language Institute
Roget's Thesaurus
Elements of Style
Guide to Grammar and Writing
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