Week 2: Introductory Comments on Linguistics Readings

In the early 1990s, in an essay entitled "Curriculum Mortis," I pointed out that there was a significant missing element in linguistics and TESOL studies in the U. S. academy in that these fields focused on on theoretical or applied research carried out stubbornly in the absence of any recognition of their consequences for and engagement with the social and political conditions in which they functioned. At the same time, I noted (more problematically for me as a literature scholar) that, despite all the political self-consciousness of literary and cultural studies scholarship, we were missing some obvious opportunities to engage issues of postcolonial politics, globalization, etc., right under our own noses because of the narrowly literature-centered focus of our curricula and the disdainful elitism with which literary scholars have tended to view applied fields such as TESOL.

In recent years at least part of this vacuum (the TESOL part) has been filled very admirably in books such as Alistair Pennycook's Critical Applied Linguistics and Lilie Chouliaraki's and Norman Fairclough's Discourse in Late Modernity. I've included a chapter from each of these books among the readings for this week because I think they will be useful for what I hope will become our ongoing exploration of the place of English studies in the current moment of postmodernity/late modernity and globalization.

I've also included a couple of incidental items for your interest. The first is a recent New York Times article about the emergence of "Verlan" an oppositional vernacular French. The second is a review of journals in applied linguistics that I wrote as a sample for you to use in completing your first formal writing assignment for this course, which is to write a review of journals in a subfield of English studies.

The other texts I've assigned from the MLA's Introduction to Scholarship--Finegan, Baron and Kramsch--all date from the early 1990s, and they reflect a much different intellectual environment for linguistics and TESOL. That is, the MLA texts represent linguistics and TESOL as existing in a framework of a modernist theoretical paradigm; the subjects are historical, scientific, humanistic and concerned with cognitive and individualistic development. They are not, or at best they are only indirectly, cognizant of the politics--the institutional, cultural and social politics--of the discipline of English studies and its subdisciplines.

I hope this brief introduction will provide a sort of "macro-level" framework for our discussion of the texts. But, to address the readings at a more detailed level, here are some questions you might consider in reading the texts from Finegan, Baron and Kramsch.

Finegan:
(1) Consider the usefulness of the concept "possible human grammar." How would this concept be mapped variously on the terrain of modernity, of modern linguistics and of English studies?
(2) What is the relationship between "generative grammar" and "functionalist grammar"? How would you situate these terms in relation to the modernity-postmodernity continuum?
(3) What is the political and/or theoretical significance of "historical linguistics" historically and in contemporary linguistics.

Baron:
(1) What are the key issues for understanding the relationship between language and culture?
(2) What can we understand about the history of Modernity and its consequences from a consideration of the relationship between imposed languages and colonialism?

Kramsch:
(1) What was the significance of Chomsky's intervention for the teaching of Second Language Acquisition?
(2) Do you see any correlation between the relationship of modernity and postmodernity, on the one hand, and the basic assumptions of Chomsky's and Corder's theories, on the other?