Doing English Language

A Guide for Students

Angela Goddard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135735753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

Doing English Language provides a concise, lively and accessible introduction to the field of English Language studies for readers who are interested in taking courses at university level.

This book addresses the fundamental questions about studying English Language, including:

• How is English Language studied and researched?
• Which subject areas does English Language draw on?
• How are different topics approached?
• How is the study of English Language relevant to real world contexts?
• What careers can English Language lead to?

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Written by an experienced teacher, researcher, and examiner, Doing English Language is both an essential guide for students at pre-university stage and a course companion for undergraduates choosing options within a degree programme.

1

Where did the study of English Language come from?

The study of English Language, like the study of English Literature, has developed only relatively recently at university level in the UK. Until the very end of the nineteenth century, there was no such subject as ‘English’ in universities, and students who wanted to study the language and literature of a culture took ‘Classics’ – the language and literature of Ancient Greece and Rome, civilisations that were much admired and imitated throughout the Western world. Early attitudes to what was deemed ‘respectable’ within the area of English study can be seen in a pamphlet produced in 1887 by Henry Nettleships, an Oxford University Professor of Classics. This pamphlet, entitled The Study of Modern European Languages and Literatures at the University of Oxford, rejected the study of English Literature as in any way comparable to Classics, but saw philology – the study of the history of language – as just about acceptable. However, philology, as conceived then, was not about the real language of contemporary English speakers or about any aspects of social history (such as language for new inventions or new experiences). It was described as a ‘science’, looking at the history of specific language features. Think of philology as comparable to the classification of types of insect (entomology) or plants and flowers (botany), where scholars work to categorise and label types and sub-types.

While the study of English Literature at university level was rapidly established during the twentieth century, particularly after the First World War (1914–18), the study of English Language at that same level never really acquired an independent existence until more recently. However, UK universities have not been the only site of debate about the nature of English Language.

In the broader educational world beyond universities, nineteenth-century Britain was a time of rapid social change. In particular, the Elementary Education Act of 1870 resulted in compulsory schooling for children aged 5–12, and by 1880, 3,000–4,000 schools had opened or had been taken over by School Boards (Stephens 1998). So beyond the formal study of English Language at university level, there were some fundamental issues about what kind of language should be taught and learnt within the school system, both in the UK and further afield, across the British Empire.

The beginnings of universal schooling in the UK coincided (not accidentally) with the establishment of a number of powerful groups whose aim was to preserve the idea of national heritage. So, for example, while the new National Trust saw its role to preserve culturally significant landmarks, the English Association (established in 1907) saw its role as rather similar – to promote English Language as a kind of gateway for appreciating ‘great literary works’. The idea was that English Language would be a cultural vehicle for the transmission of the values of the ruling elite, not as a medium for ordinary individuals to use for self-expression and personal identity. The latter idea is much more recent.

Teachers of English language in the early days of compulsory education were seen as ‘speech missionaries’ in the UK as well across the British Empire. In India, an Education Act in 1835 required Indian schools to use English as the medium of instruction. In the UK, the issue was also about requiring new forms of language to be learnt by those being newly schooled – but this time it was about requiring regional, working-class English speakers to acquire Standard English vocabulary and grammar, and to change their accents to Received Pronunciation (RP), the prestige accent which had developed in the English public schools, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and therefore all the main offices of Church and State. In order to justify this idea, powerful figures in society frequently portrayed the language of UK regional, working-class speakers as inadequate. They were considered to have a poor vocabulary:

A country Clergyman informed me that he believed the labourers in his parish had not 300 words in their vocabulary, and a recent article in the Quarterly extends the statements to the great mass of our rural population.

(D’Orsey 1861)

Regional language was often described as corrupting, degenerate and abnormal:

‘The language is going to pieces before our eyes, especially under the influence of the debased dialect of the Cockney, which is spreading from our schools and training colleges all over the country’ (Ratcliffe 1909).

‘Manchester children … spoke the perverted Lancashire dialect of the towns, had a narrow vocabulary, and could not understand diction’ (Shawcross, Chairman of the Examination Board of the National Union of Teachers 1909).

On reading these quotes, you might be thinking that although the language of the complaints has been toned down a bit, not that much has actually changed. You could argue that in the UK there is still a lot of prejudice about regional language and that the false idea of Standard English as a superior form of language use continues to have some currency. The point is that studying English Language now includes focusing precisely on such issues, analysing the factors involved, and trying to understand how present attitudes to language have arisen. This is not all that the study of English Language is about, however.

Scholarship in the area of English Language is also interested in using language, as some of the university departments that currently house degree level work include modules on professional writing in all its forms. Again, a historical dimension and a focus on the education system can help explain this emphasis. In the early days of compulsory schooling, English Language was conceived as a medium for admiring literature, and for learning about the values of the ruling classes, not about individual creativity or expression. Over the years, there have been many debates and contested ideas about what exactly the school curriculum for English should include, and many official reports on that subject have been issued (for example, the Newbolt Report in 1921, the Bullock Report in 1975, the Kingman Report in 1988). Gradually, the idea of acquiring skills in English in order to be an effective communicator – not simply in order to write about literature – has gained ground within the school system, and this has had a knock-on effect within higher education. A very recent development – that of the emergence of Creative Writing courses in universities – can be seen as one outcome of this process.

The phrase ‘creative writing’ used to be associated with literary authors and texts, but now often has a much wider meaning of innovative and original writing in any genre or format. Undoubtedly, the rise of Web 2.0 technologies, with users now able to create their own digital compositions, has brought a new dynamism to the whole area.

2

Where did the subject of Linguistics come from?

The answer to this question depends on two things: (1) your cultural perspective; and (2) your definition of Linguistics, particularly how you see the difference between Linguistics and other subject areas. These two aspects are interconnected, as you will see below.

European academics looking for a modern starting point for Linguistics tend to refer particularly to the work of a twentieth-century Swiss scholar called Ferdinand de Saussure and to his Course in General Linguistics which was repeatedly delivered between 1907 and 1911 at the University of Geneva. His lectures were published posthumously in 1916 and have since been re-published many times (for example, de Saussure 1974). Some of de Saussure’s central concepts spread well beyond Linguistics to have a strong influence on other areas, where they have had a lasting effect. For example, his term and concept – semiology (also now referred to as semiotics) – has heavily influenced work in Media Studies and is still current. More will be said about his influential concepts in Chapters 4 and 5.

The European tradition represents only one strand of Linguistics. To take an example from a different cultural tradition, language study in India can be traced back as far as the fourth century BC, where scholars such as Panini undertook what we might now call a grammatical analysis – in this case, of Sanskrit (see Katre 1987). The aim of such early studies of language was often to interpret religious texts; there were similar early traditions in China and parts of the Middle East.

In the UK, there had been various kinds of analyses of language well before de Saussure – for example, the tradition of philology, mentioned earlier, which drew on linguistic as well as literary scholarship. However, one reason why de Saussure is marked out as initiating a distinctive approach is that he focused on contemporary usage (termed synchronic usage) as well as historical, or diachronic, perspectives, seeing linguistic elements as existing in a network of structural relationships. Also, he distinguished language as a system (la langue) from language in use (la parole). The idea of looking at the language actually used by speakers – as opposed to the language they are thought to use, or the language seen as appropriate for them – is something which characterises English Language study today.

In the USA, early accounts of language-in-use tended to come from researchers with anthropological interests. For example, Edward Sapir (1885–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) studied Native American languages and explored the relationship between language, thought and behaviour, raising questions about the extent to which language users could express ideas that were not already encoded in the language they acquired. The idea that language could act as a filter, shaping how speakers see the world, came to be called the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis after these two scholars. More recently, this deterministic idea has been challenged and currently a more relativist approach is accepted, where language is thought to have a powerful influence but not a totally imprisoning effect.

Although early American Linguistics was quite heavily influenced by the Saussurean tradition, the late twentieth century saw the subject area take a strong cognitive direction – that is, a focus on how language is processed by individuals – under the lead of Noam Chomsky. This more psychological orientation, coupled with a focus on whether all languages have an underlying universal similarity in their structure, meant that Linguistics often had a strong presence alongside foreign language learning and teaching in many university departments, including TESOL (the teaching of English to speakers of other languages).

The account above is necessarily brief, and more will be said about the different areas of study in the chapters that follow. However, it is important to note at this point that, unlike the study of literary texts, language work has varied in terms of whether it is seen primarily as an arts and humanities, or a science, subject, and this has influenced where it is housed in universities at a local level. So, while the study of literature is fairly consistently seen as an arts-oriented activity, language study can certainly be oriented towards the arts – for example, studying linguistic patterns in graffiti might well involve thinking about artistic creativity – but it can also be connected with scientific approaches, such as in speech and language therapy, artificial intelligence or forensics. This breadth is a particular strength of modern approaches to English Language: for example, see the range of applications in Hall et al. (2011). However, such variation, along with local specialisms, also means that applicants to courses need to look in some detail at what type of study is being offered, to make sure that it suits individual needs and aspirations.

3

UK 2011 benchmarks for the study of English Language

The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in the UK (QAA) is responsible for ensuring that higher education institutions (HEIs) conform to agreed standards on their programmes, including the scope of different subject areas. The QAA produces statements called ‘benchmarks’ which describe the nature of academic subjects, including likely subject content, approaches to assessment, and connections to other academic areas.

Benchmarks for English Literature and for Linguistics have existed for some time, but newly growing domains, such as Creative Writing and English Language, have not had their own benchmarks until now. The QAA stopped officially commissioning new sets of benchmarks some time ago, but have supported the production of benchmarks by expert groups, for new subject areas. The benchmark statements for English Language, which are referred to regularly in this book, have this status of guidance.

The benchmark documents are very lengthy and detailed, so are not reproduced here in full: links to them can be found in the References. However, a summary of the most important points for English Language is given below.

The introductory section of the English Language benchmarks notes that a number of different groups will benefit from an outline of the English Language subject area: school teachers who advise school-leavers on the choice of university degree courses; academics considering the introduction of a new degree in English Language, or revalidating an existing one; and employers who wish to understand an applicant’s programme of English Language study in greater detail. An obvious audience – perhaps too obvious to mention – are the applicants to university themselves. For that group, the benchmarks are a way of understanding both what an English Language degree might cover, and also how this might vary according to the nature of the university and/or the expertise of the staff group operating the programme. Matching the benchmark statements against ...