Literary Linguistics in the Context of a Literature Department

American Speech, 2023

The purpose of this article is to stage a much-needed conversation around what it means to think about the project of teaching linguistics in diverse postsecondary institutional contexts and in particular Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs). The conversation we present is based both in our scholarship as sociolinguists working with diverse language issues in U.S. Latinx speech communities and in our work as faculty at two of the largest Hispanic-serving institutions in the United States. In this paper, we discuss the possibilities, promises, and challenges of teaching (socio)linguistics at universities designated as “Hispanic-serving.” We take as a starting premise for this conversation that “courses (across the curriculum) inherited from traditionally white colleges and universities may implicitly disenfranchise ethnic- and language-minority students. These courses should be rethought and repurposed with intention, lest further generations of students learn that a prerequisite for scholastic success is divestment from their home language, culture, and identity” (Artze-Vega, Carter, and Russell 2020, 39). In other words, the project of teaching linguistics at HSIs is as much about thinking through what linguistics is or should be – and for whom – as it is about “adapting” content to new learning contexts. As such, this conversation involves raising challenging questions about the discipline, about the purpose of teaching linguistics, and about language itself.

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2018

The basic assumption in applied linguistics is that the expert disciplinary study of linguistics can yield insights which can be applied to an understanding of how language is actually experienced, and so provide a principled basis for intervention by proposing ways of resolving the problems that peoples experience in using and learning language gives rise to. But the validity of this assumption depends on how is expertise in linguistics to be defined, and how far, as it has been conventionally practiced, can it claim to account for the reality of how individuals experience language? What, for example, does it tell us, and not tell us, about how users and learners think and feel about their own and other peoples language, and what effect their attitude has on their using and learning? These are crucial questions about the scope of linguistics and its applied linguistic relevance since they have an immediate and urgent bearing on the problematic issues that applied linguistics would claim to address of how communication is enacted across different lingua-cultural and ideological borders in a globalized world. Since this global communication is predominantly mediated by the expedient use of English as a lingua franca, it raises the applied linguistic question that this talk will be centrally concerned with of what pedagogic implications this has for how English is conventionally taught as a foreign language subject.

2016

The essays in and Lipski (2007) raised relevant considerations about the status of Hispanic Linguistics in American universities, and Del Valle's comments (2014) confirmed the ongoing validity of those remarks on Hispanic Linguistics as a research area and as an educational field. These are two sides of the same coin: our research, divulged in conference papers, journal articles, book chapters, and books; and our activities, such as teaching courses, advising students, or directing theses and dissertations. When there is a good fit between the two sides, research and teaching may be closely related. Due to circumstances to be commented on below, however, the synergy between research and teaching is often tenuous. Whereas literature professors at research universities rarely give courses outside their specialization, in the same institutions it is not unusual for the one or two linguists in the Spanish department to teach courses in areas-phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and language variation-unrelated to their research field. In addition, Hispanic linguists are often responsible for activities that, while benefitting from their specialized training, do not constitute linguistics per se, such as training teaching assistants, designing language courses, or directing language programs. Comments on this arrangement appeared in several of the essays mentioned above and need not be revisited here. Regarding research, the past decade has seen an impressive output in Spanish linguistics. Traditional venues, such as the conventions of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) and, to a lesser extent, the Modern Language Association (MLA), have featured essays on Spanish linguistics; the Congress on Spanish in the United States, first held in 1980, and the Congress of Spanish in Contact with other Languages (held jointly with the latter since 1991) have continued to be active venues for a growing number of specialists; and the first congress of the recently reactivated Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE), held in June 2014, featured essays on Spanish in the United States.

1973

The study of language is an interdisciplinary field, since language can be seen to embody characteristics of psychology, linguistics, literature, sociology, anthropology, education, and the sciences. Teachers of language can no longer afford to ignore useful

It is widely agreed that in teacher training courses, the development of academic writing as a linguistic macro-skill of production gains increasing relevance in the lives of students and future researchers and professionals of the language. Academic Literacy (AL), however, goes beyond that, engaging the trainees in the development of other competences, being academic writing but one aspect of the process. AL in ELT vocational courses in Argentina is ever more complex for it is aimed at not only training students to belong to a scientific/discourse community that requires them to develop specific disciplinary knowledge skills and thinking patterns, our students are also in the process of becoming proficient users of EFL, the means for development and the object of study in their professional life. In this regard, academic writing itself should be understood as the powerful epistemological tool it is for constructing disciplinary knowledge; writing as the means to gain and get hold of, transform and communicate knowledge about this foreign language. Applied linguistics and the implementation of pedagogical corpus applications in ELT-training courses at university has provided enhanced teaching strategies likely to foster the development of a) trainees' knowledge of EFL; b) writing as a macro-skill, and c) the target academic culture of research. This paper is a report on an experience incorporating the advances of applied linguistics and the analysis of digitized corpora in a writing course for teacher training students with a B2 level of proficiency. Fostering a nascent but significant research culture as the defining aspect of the target community, the implementation of simple research strategies to elucidate the uses of different lexico-grammatical items in digitalized genuine academic texts has helped them gain knowledge about the system of the language while promoting a gradual progress towards autonomy.

1974

Linguistics can have useful applications in elementary and secondary language arts instruction, in a number of areas of skill development. The issue of student motivation is involved with the form of language used-standard or nonstandard-and educators may adopt the linguistic view that all forms of language have value and their use depends on the occasion. The mechanics of reading and writing involve skills o: recognising and reproducing letters; linguists' work in the area of phoneme-grapheme correspondence can be useful here. Reading comprehension involves ability to understand sentences and texts through the disciplines of semantics (including grammatical and lexical meaning), textual analysis, and syntax. Vocabulary building, while often over emphasized as an indicator of educational lovely is an important language skill; words and lexical units may be categorized according to subculture and taxonomy as they best relate to the students. Oral and writtPn expression and composition must be concerned with syntax, stylistics, textual analysis, and standard language theory, all fialds in which linguistic findings can be part of the educational process. (CH)

1988

In the ten years since the Modern Language Association published their report, “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World” (2007) dissatisfaction with the “two-tiered configuration” of US foreign language departments has become increasingly vocal. While the target of the criticism is often the curriculum, it has often been noted that programmatic bifurcations mirror institutional hierarchies, e.g. status differences between specialists in literary and cultural studies and experts in applied linguistics and language pedagogy (e.g. Maxim et al;, 2013Allen & Maxim, 2012).Curricular models which reimagine the desired learning outcomes of collegiate foreign language programs in terms of design awareness (Kern, 2000), “textual thinking” (e.g. Maxim, 2009),and even “literary thinking” (e.g. Richardson, 2016) seem to call for scholars who work at least at some level across literary studies and applied linguistics—a trend that is evidenced in recent job postings in the modern language humanities fields; however, the translation of the transdisciplinary work of these scholars into recognizable research tracks within existing institutional is often ad hoc and at times precarious. This paper looks at the two-tiered structure of collegiate modern language departments from the perspective of the transdisciplinary shape shifters who maneuver within them—scholars working between applied linguistics and literary studies. These individuals must negotiate the methodologies and the institutional positions available to them—in many instances, the latter is what has prompted them to work between fields in the first place. A key consideration of this paper will be the lived experience of doing transdisciplinary work in contexts that are characterized by disciplinary hierarchies, and thus the primary sources will be interviews conducted with individuals at various career levels from doctoral students on up and autoethnographic reflections from the presenter.

Since the mid-20th century, graduate schools in the USA have witnessed a growing participation of international students, many of whom do not speak English as their first language. Previous research has often portrayed non-native-English-speaking (NNES) students in US doctoral programs as disadvantaged because of the presumed primacy of English in their academic pursuits. This study examines NNES doctoral students' participation in US academia, and in doing so, challenges this assumption. Drawing on the concepts of communities of practice and capital , the study analyzes how linguistic competence plays out in NNES students' participation in three different disciplines. We argue that language competence as cultural capital does not have the same value across different disciplines and may not always be critical to NNES students'academic success. Furthermore, despite their keen awareness of their differences from their native-speaking counterparts, the NNES doctoral students in this study had other forms of cultural capital with which they claimed legitimacy and recognition in their disciplinary communities.