DOI: 10.1017/S026607840300105644 English Today 73, Vol. 19, No. 1 (January 2003). Printed in the United Kingdom © 2003 Cambridge University Press

[Portions of this paper were presented at the35th International Congress for Medieval Stud-ies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 4 May 2000.]

‘It is no wonder that first-time educators feeldaunted by such a survey course thatencompasses historical linguistic theory,modern linguistic theory, and textual andhistorical studies over a thousand years.’

A few years ago, when I began consideringwhat would be most useful to discuss concern-ing current issues in pedagogy and the Historyof the English Language, I did a quick searchthrough the on-line MLA Bibliography andthen through Linguistics and Language Behav-ior Abstracts and finally through the ERICdatabase to see if I could find just a few pub-lished articles on the history of pedagogicaltraditions of such a course over perhaps thelast forty years.

To my surprise, I uncovered nothing in mysearch. I did find a few articles on the teachingof Old English specifically but nothing on theHistory of the English Language related to ped-agogy. I subsequently, posted a query on theon-line discussion group for the History of theEnglish Language (HEL) asking if anyone couldpoint me to pedagogical sources in the field. Ireceived a few replies and I quote them heredirectly (hel-l, 14 Jan 2000).

One respondent, from the University of Que-bec, made the following reply:

I submitted a post some months back in which Isuggested that a history of the English languagecourse for non-specialists should de-emphasizethe linguistic detail and add importance to therelated historical, sociological, and cultural

aspects. This provoked no response. Further, Ihave found there to be little to no interest insuch pedagogical matters – perhaps becausemost members are specialists – unlike myself. Ihave also found no articles on the matterthough doing one might be an idea.

A second respondent from the University ofNew Orleans informed me that there was sometime back, perhaps nine or ten years ago, “acollection of articles under preparation” in theMLA Approaches to Teaching Series, but todate the volume has not appeared. No one wasable to name the editors of that volume.

An Assistant Professor from New MexicoState University replied that he “would love tohear from anyone else who may know wherethis book stands currently.” He says that “sucha collection would surely be of immense value,particularly to those of us (that is, me, at least),facing the prospect of teaching his first HELcourse next year.”

So we may conclude from all this that we arenot, for reasons which I would like to explore,engaging in active formal discourse on theteaching of this course, nor are we providingbeginning teachers with written resources tohelp them consider different approaches,philosophies, strategies, and rationales inteaching the course. Thanks to on-line discus-sion groups, we do at least have available nowan informal vehicle for such discussion. Hel-lwas created in 1996 at Virginia Tech and stillconsists of active participants. The list cur-rently totals around 400 subscribers, mostlyeducators, but a fair number of non-academicaddresses are included as subscribers as well.

Why? and How? – Teaching thehistory of the English languagein our new millenniumR. A. BUCK

A discussion of the difficulties that beset teaching ‘HEL’ inAmerican universities

HEL: an interdisciplinary field?

Perhaps one reason we are not engaged inactive formal discourse on the teaching of theHistory of the English Language is (contrary towhat the first respondent suggests) preciselythe fact that most of us who teach the coursesee ourselves rather as non-specialists in thefield and therefore learners rather than expertsto offer advice. If we stop to consider it, whoindeed are the people who actually specializein the History of the English Language? Mosteducators who teach this course at the univer-sity level in the United States, at least, are inEnglish departments and generally have abackground either in linguistics or medievalstudies, and yet, although both fields offer suf-ficient background for the teaching of thiscourse, few of us from either field consider our-selves expert at such a far-reaching subject,that is, the linguistic and non-linguistic factorsthat have contributed to the development ofthe English language over 5,000 years.

For most of us who are linguists teaching thecourse, few can attest to a dissertation topicrelated to the History of the English Language.Moreover, we would probably concur that, inour doctoral programs, we were lucky to havehad one course in historical linguistics and cer-tainly no courses in Old or Middle English oreven the diachronic development of Englishspecifically. Current doctoral programs in lin-guistics without a doubt concern themselveswith present-day spoken English out of its his-torical context. Most linguists who teach theHistory of the English Language, then, proba-bly regard their area of specialization as soci-olinguistics or pragmatics or linguistic stylisticsor discourse analysis or semantics or syntax,and so forth, rather than historical linguistics.

Medievalists, too, may find themselves in anawkward position teaching such a course.Their doctoral studies are often consumed byliterary rather than language studies with per-haps some training, but not extensive training,in linguistics. Furthermore, sociolinguisticissues that arise after the medieval period arenot what they have studied particularly, nor dothey find themselves expert in the linguistics ofEarly Modern English. Even Middle Englishspecialists may face Old English grammaticalaspects with trepidation. So educators fromboth fields come into the teaching of thiscourse feeling secure in certain aspects and abit insecure in others.

If we consider who indeed is a true specialistin the History of the English Language, ourcharacterization of such a person thenbecomes a bit more evasive, for researchers inthe field generally focus on particular periodsof the language and therefore identify them-selves more as specialists in the period ratherthan as specialists in the History of the EnglishLanguage. Researchers who investigate lan-guage issues related to Middle English, in otherwords, present themselves as Middle Englishspecialists; the same holds true in Old English.In fact, if we look through a handful of recentlypublished volumes of research in the History ofthe English Language, we find that mostauthors capture particular grammaticalaspects of a particular time period rather thanconsider these aspects diachronically over suc-cessive periods of time. In a recent (1998) vol-ume edited by Stein and Sornicola, we find thefollowing articles:

● Grammaticalisation, Textuality and Subjec-tivity: The Progressive and The Anglo-SaxonChronicle

● The Language of ‘wit’ in Piers Plowman● Relative Sentences in Middle English: The

Paston and the Cely Letters.

We find this same representation in To Explainthe Present: Studies in the Changing EnglishLanguage in Honour of Matti Rissanen, a 1997volume where, for instance, we find an article“Speaker Innovation, Textual Revision and theCase of Joseph Addison”, although a few articlesdo attempt larger diachronic studies. HistoricalLinguistics 1995, a volume edited by Richard M.Hogg and Linda Van Bergen focusing onresearch in Germanic Linguistics, is perhapsmore specifically centered on language change.We find modern language studies in sociolin-guistics (dialect and attitudinal studies), a rangeof articles on the theory of language change, andarticles focused on aspects of language within aparticular historical period but that take intoconsideration other historical periods in theiranalysis: for example: “The Development ofSecondary Stress in Old English”; “Post-verbalComplements in Old English”; “MorphologicalRestructuring: The Case of Old and MiddleEnglish Verbs.”

My point here is that these volumes of cur-rent research in the field reflect the interests ofspecialists in the History of the English Lan-guage; that is, specialists in Old English, inMiddle English, in historical linguistics, in

TEACHING THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN OUR NEW MILLENNIUM 45

Germanic linguistics, in sociolinguistics, inmorphology, in 17th and 18th century litera-ture, and so forth. The specialist in the Historyof the English Language, in other words, ismost often indeed a specialist in a related fieldand so we must conclude that the History of theEnglish Language is actually an interdiscipli-nary field rather than one that is narrowlydefined. This interdisciplinary nature enrichesthe field, yet paradoxically educators as a resultdo not view themselves as expert and thereforeshy away from pedagogical discussion.

The student audience

Now that I have considered who the educatorsare, I would like to characterize our audience,the students who by chance or by designappear in our classroom for such a course. AtEastern Illinois University, the History of theEnglish Language is available to seniors andgraduate students. The mix is generally mostlyundergraduates with a few graduate studentspursuing a master’s degree. There are no pre-requisites for the course so most students enterthe course without having taken even one lan-guage or linguistics class. The Structure of theEnglish Language and Introduction to Linguis-tics are offered in the department at the sopho-more and junior levels, but most students inthe History of the English Language course,have, for some reason, been able to avoid suchclasses. Most students are fulfilling a languagerequirement for English education or are sim-ply general English majors. Most undergradu-ates as well as the graduate students have hadlittle or no training in reading or examiningmedieval or historical texts. In addition, stu-dents come to my class with very little trainingin English history, nor do they reveal a confi-dent sense of literary history.

It is no wonder, then, that first-time educa-tors feel daunted by such a survey course thatencompasses historical linguistic theory, mod-ern linguistic theory, and textual and historicalstudies over a thousand years.

And yet it seems that, in teaching such acourse, the biggest challenge for us as educa-tors is to attempt to define specifically what webelieve are the goals of such a course, whatskills or knowledge we want to be able todevelop in our students, and how we wish ourstudents to use this knowledge after they leaveour classrooms. The difficulty lies in the factthat in considering common goals for such a

course we must consider a mixed audience:one that includes elementary educationseniors and secondary education Englishmajors who will be out of the classroom as stu-dents and teaching themselves very shortly,and one that as well includes graduate stu-dents, who, though they might not yet haveconsidered specializing in medieval studies orlinguistics may now be introduced to such anidea or may even already have decided thatthis is an area they are likely to pursue andmay have some knowledge already about his-torical language study. Graduate students wholike the History of the English Language tendto then choose a concentration in medievalstudies, so the History of the English Languagecourse is an excellent beginning backgroundcourse to recruit and interest students in fur-ther medieval courses.

Textbooks and topics

In some respects, the textbooks we have avail-able to us for teaching the course dominate ourway of viewing our goals for the course. Pylesand Algeo’s The Origins and Development of theEnglish Language and C. M. Millward’s A Biog-raphy of the English Language are perhaps themost widely used textbooks, along with theiraccompanying workbooks. Both books providea descriptive linguistic approach to the field,the focus of which is, as Pyles and Algeo state intheir Preface, a description of “the internal his-tory of English – its sounds, grammar, andvocabulary” (v). Millward states the difficultiesof writing such a textbook, for it is “impossibleto do justice to both the theory and the sub-stance of the history of English, even in a two-semester course,” (v). Millward, as a compro-mise, focuses on a description of the internalhistory of the language but provides additionalshort discussions on the “political and culturalevents” that have influenced language change(v). Millward also states that the aim of pre-senting the internal history of the language isto show that “languages and language changeare systematic” and that “nearly everything inthe history of English has left its traces on theEnglish of today, (v).

In contrast, Baugh and Cable in A History ofthe English Language, another widely used text-book, emphasize in the Preface “the full atten-tion paid [in their textbook] to the historicaland cultural setting of the development of thelanguage” (xiii). Their aim is to present “a

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TEACHING THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN OUR NEW MILLENNIUM 47

proper balance between what may be calledinternal history – sounds and inflections – andexternal history – the political, social, andintellectual forces that have determined thecourse of that development at different peri-ods” (Baugh in first edition quoted in Baughand Cable xiii). Baugh and Cable, however,even though attempting to strike a balance, fallshort on the linguistic material, leaving unex-plained important chunks of the language’sinternal history.

It is difficult to decide, then, in a one-semes-ter course with such a mixed audience, whichmaterial to leave out and which material toforeground. How essential is it for educationmajors to learn major changes from Indo-Euro-pean to Germanic, comparative reconstructionmethods, and Grimm's Law and Verner’s Law?Likewise, am I as concerned that my studentscan identify and characterize linguistic featuresof British English and Scottish and Irishdialects as I am that they study features ofAfrican-American English, understand a littleof its history, and read about current contro-versies that surround its use in the classroom?In other words, from a purely descriptive view-point, there is no doubt that reading and exam-ining and analyzing British, Scottish, and Irishdialects is enriching and demonstrates colorfulvariety, yet ultimately I wonder how we wantour students to use this material in theirfutures. Are not the study of language attitudesthat surround the use of dialects more valuableto their future experience?

It seems, too, that our textbooks fail to makeconnections to current modern language con-troversies. What our textbooks do not fore-ground, and what is especially relevant today,is that many current language issues are boundto the history of prescriptivism that the stu-dents see unfolding from the 18th centuryonward. Students, sometimes for the first time,realize that standard variety is chosen for socialreasons and tied to the society’s attitudes aboutpeople who speak those and other non-stan-dard varieties. Language and gender issues,and also second language issues (especially asthey relate to xenophobia and nationalism inthe United States) in addition can be explainedin terms of that history, and Standard Ameri-can English today exemplifies these issues inconflict and in transition. Studying the historyof the language enables us to see clearly howthese issues, at a linguistic level, are not natu-rally inherent to internal grammatical systems

but are rather imposed on them and sustainedby particular groups of people.

Likewise, what is one to do with chaptersthat include long lists of vocabulary items suchas we find in Chapter 12 in Pyles and Algeo,“Foreign Elements in English Word Stock”?Each section includes long lists of words bor-rowed from Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Ital-ian, German, the Near East, India, Iran, Africa,Native American, and so forth. Our textbookshave a way of divorcing language from the peo-ple who use it. Might it not be more engagingto summarize briefly the cosmopolitan natureof our modern vocabulary and explore waysthat people use the language and vocabulary toexpress various identities and voices in theirtexts? The same approach applies to chapterson Other Englishes.

My point here is not to politicize the field.However, in taking a traditional descriptive lin-guistic approach, our textbooks fail to makerelevant why it is important to study languagehistory in the first place. My view justexpressed here primarily concerns treatment ofthe language from 1800 onward.

Language, text, and an evolvingsubject

As far as the early material is concerned, I ques-tion too the way our textbooks list paradigmsof the grammar of each period without engag-ing students in examining and discovering whyit is useful to learn such a tool. And, as a lin-guist, I do recognize this aspect of the course asvaluable to our students, for, without examin-ing the grammar, the students’ critical aware-ness of language remains undeveloped andunchallenged, and our students are left withonly a general sense of our language history.Without the paradigms and descriptive fea-tures, it is impossible to develop a criticalawareness in students that allows them to ana-lyze and recognize elements in historical textson their own.

This relation of language to text is what ismissing in our textbooks. I would like to seemore discovery of textual elements in thematerial rather than activities and exercisesthat simply reiterate aspects of grammar. I dobelieve that one important goal for the coursethat gets overlooked is, after all, textual. Thecourse offers a way of introducing students,sometimes for the first time, to the notion ofhistorical text: it engages them in hearing and

48 ENGLISH TODAY 73 January 2003

pronouncing the language of different peri-ods; it teaches them to notice language, tolook very carefully for features of languagethat are familiar and also not-so-familiar tothem; it shows them different visual represen-tations of text and helps them to identify andrecognize graphic conventions of different historical periods.

These are all skill-building exercises thattrain the mind in ways that not all literatureclasses do. The course also challenges the stu-dents’ very notion of book and text, especiallyrelevant in today's ever-changing technologicalenvironment. Dennis Freeborn’s (1998) text-book, From Old English to Standard English, is arecent attempt to bridge this gap.

I have titled my paper here very closely to M. J.Toswell’s (1995) article, “Teaching Old Englishin the Next Millennium: Why? And How?” forseveral reasons. First, I would like to purposelylink the arguments Toswell articulates on whythe teaching of Old English remains importantto the English curriculum to arguments forteaching the History of the English Language,for many of those arguments indeed apply justas well. For instance, in order to understandour language of today, “we must consider theissues … of yesterday” (81); in order “to placeour own culture in any kind context, we need asense that is more than superficial of at leastone culture” (81). The History of the EnglishLanguage, like Old English, provides studentswith “a sense of the rich historical traditionthat is literature” and develops in students acareful “attention on details of the language”(81).

But I would also like to purposely link theconcerns the author raises that center on thechanging place of Old English in the currentEnglish curriculum to concerns faced by thelanguage and linguistics courses within thatsame curriculum. Toswell states that the fieldof Old English studies “is, or is about to be,under the most sustained attack it has everfaced” (80) and laments the fact that “the studyof Old English/Anglo-Saxon has been margin-alized by the mainstream world of Englishstudies …” (80). I would like to quote hereToswell’s conclusion:

For the first time in its century-long history, thestudy of English will in the next few years becompressing another century into itscurriculum. There will be some who argue thatOld and Middle English should include the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well andthat lately the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies have been acknowledged as havingunexpected common territory – in order tomake room in the academic timetable for awide selection of twentieth-century literatures.My incipient paranoia is not entirely unfoundedbecause the subject in which I teach and learnremains the least understood subject in anEnglish department.

In a recent article (1999), “MarginalizingGrammar,” I too have expressed these sameconcerns for the language courses in Englishdepartments, namely The Structure of the Eng-lish Language, Introduction to Linguistics, andthe History of the English Language. I point outin that article that non-traditional curricularcourses have put expanding pressure on tradi-tional requirements in the major. And it is truethat the language courses are being perceivedmore and more (because they are not in thepolitical mainstream) as old-fashioned, tradi-tional, and even conservative when looked atside-by-side with new courses being proposedinto the curriculum.

As a result, there is increasing pressure tojustify why English majors should be requiredto take a language course at all, since the elim-ination of the language tier of classes wouldhelp to get other much-needed courses in. Like-wise, much as Toswell laments, the languageand linguistics courses in English departmentsare perhaps the least understood by membersof English departments. English professors ingeneral have little extensive training in linguis-tics. Lodged in English departments, languagecourses have theoretical foundations in thefield of linguistics, not English. Not beingentirely convinced of the value of learning theworkings of grammatical systems, manydepartment members are disinclined to comeforth passionately in support for the study oflanguage, especially when there is less roomfor luxury now, less room for courses perceivedas nice-to-have but not essential.

Conclusion

I believe this debate, however challenging, isproductive. Being able to articulate the useful-ness of what we do, being able to articulate thegoals we set out to achieve with our students,and being able to explain how particular skillsand knowledge we develop in our students willhelp them in their futures are essential

TEACHING THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN OUR NEW MILLENNIUM 49

questions to revisit in all our work. In writingthis paper, I realize that I am reluctant to admitthat I am not sure how I justify the importanceof the History of the English Language courseto elementary education majors.

I cannot change the fact that we have no pre-requisites for any of the English courses in ourdepartment. That is a simple economic issue.Without prerequisites we ensure greater num-bers of students to enroll in classes; prerequi-sites simply limit enrollments. In light of this,all I can do is suggest to Elementary Educationadvisors that they steer students into the Struc-ture of the English Language or Introduction toLinguistics before suggesting the History of theEnglish Language as a possibility simply tomeet upper-division requirements. After all,how does the History of the English Languagecourse give elementary education majors skillsthey will use in their upcoming teaching? Iwould like to be able to say that just introduc-ing any student to a new area of languagestudy, as the History of the English Languagedoes, may perhaps spark some interest in themlater in their lives and end up being meaningfulto them at some later date.

However, in our new millennium, this goalof study of language for its own sake is nolonger acceptable. And, when put to the task,how does one defend the language tier againstliterature courses that specifically aim todevelop social and political critical awarenessin our students, whose direct purpose is “acommitment to social betterment of a troubledworld (Radavich 112)”? Although clearly theHistory of the English Language courseachieves a fair amount of this, can we honestlysay that this is its primary aim? Much of thetime spent in the course is devoted simply tohow internal grammatical systems work. Thatthis is time well-spent and valuable to studentsand offers them an analytical tool to help disci-pline their minds in unique ways is, to me, evi-dent. But in the large scheme of today's Englishcurriculum, where do we place this realm oflanguage training? This linguistic knowledgehas historically assumed an unchallenged posi-tion, but in today's market this can no longer betaken for granted.

It seems to me that it is especially importantat this time in our history of teaching the His-tory of the English Language that those of uswho teach medieval and language coursesinvolve ourselves formally and actively in thisdebate. We need to articulate among our-selves, but also to our colleagues, what we doas professionals; otherwise, we may find oneday that the language courses in the depart-ment have all been quietly subsumed into acomposition course with a three-week unitcalled Language and that Old English is offeredonce every ten years. n

References

Algeo, John. 1993. Problems in The Origins andDevelopment of the English Language. 4th edn. FortWorth: Harcourt Brace.

Baugh, Albert C., & Thomas Cable. 1993. A History ofthe English Language. 4th edn. Eaglewood Cliffs:Prentice Hall.

Buck, R. A. 1993. “Marginalizing Grammar.” In EnglishToday 15 (October) pp. 31–35.

Cable, Thomas. 1993. A Companion to Baugh andCable’s ‘History of the English Language. 2nd edn.Eaglewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Freeborn, Dennis. 1998. From Old English to StandardEnglish. 2nd edn. Ottawa: University of Ottawa.

Graddol, David, Dick Leith & Joan Swann. English:History, Diversity, and Change. New York: Routledge,1996.

Hogg, Richard M., & Linda Van Bergen. 1998.Historical Linguistics 1995. II: Germanic Linguistics.Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998.

Millward, C. M. 1988. A Biography of the EnglishLanguage. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace.

—. 1990. Workbook to Accompany ‘A Biography of theEnglish Language.’ Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart.

Nevalainen, Terttu, & Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, eds. 1997.To Explain the Present: Studies in the ChangingEnglish Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen.Helsinki: Societe Neophilologique,.

Pyles, Thomas, & John Algeo. 1993. The Origins andDevelopment of the English Language. 4th ed. FortWorth, Harcourt Brace.

Radavich, David. 1999. “Creative Writing in theAcademy.” In Profession: 106–112.

Stein, Dieter, & Rosanna Sornicola, eds. 1998. TheVirtues of Language: History in Language, Linguisticsand Texts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Toswell, M. J. 1995. “Teaching Old English in the NextMillennium: Why? And How?” In Profession: 79–84.

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