Language Alive in the Classroom

Subjects:

• Education » English Education
• Anthropology » Linguistics

Reviews:

• This well designed and edited collection includes a variety of essays that add to the discussion of why language should be part of any English major's program and how specific areas within linguistics can add to this much needed focus.
  —Southwest Journal of Linguistics

• Endorsement From William Murdick
  Professor of English
  California University of Pennsylvania: If you feel caught between those shallow all-about-language readers and those dry count-the-morphemes introductory linguistics texts, take a look at Wheeler's book. The essays are authoritative, but also creative and fun. This is the sort of book many of us in English education have been calling for.
• Endorsement From Connie Weaver
  Professor of English, Western Michigan University.: Shying away from the popular notion that grammar be taught in isolation as a means of inculcating a prestige dialect, the language scholars in this volume broaden the focus and demonstrate, instead, just what the title promises: how to make language come alive in the classroom. I'm especially delighted with the inductive activities for guiding students to discover language patterns for themselves. Typically these activities...are appropriate not only for college students, but for secondary and even elementary students. I am eager to try some of them!
• Endorsement From Andrea Abernethy Lunsford
  Professor of English
  Ohio State University: Whether you are an aspiring, brand new, or well-seasoned teacher of English Language Arts, Language Alive in the Classroom should be on your reading list....Clearly and accessibly written, these essays introduce readers to particular projects that bring language to life in the classroom by putting students directly to work at identifying and analyzing language structures and "rules" across a wide range of varieties of English and in both spoken and written discourse, including the discourse of literature. This is a book that English teachers have needed for a long time, one whose many lessons can immediately be put to good use in classrooms across the grade levels.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction by Rebecca S. Wheeler
• Beyond Grammar of the Traditional Kind
• Grammar,Tradition and the Living Language by David B. Umbach
• The Persistence of Traditional Grammar by Edwin Battistella
• Prestige English Is not a Natural Language by Nicholas Sobin
• New Ways in the Classroom
• Dialect Awareness Programs in the School and Community by Walt Wolfram
• Linguistics Is for Kids by Jeannine M. Donna
• Looking at Life Through Language by Patricia MacGregor-Mendoza
• In Front of Our Eyes: Undergraduates Reflecting on Language Change by Anca Nemoianu
• Grammar Teaching Is Dead--NOT! by Richard Hudson
• Language and Writing
• Writing Standard English IS Acquiring a Second Language by Susan K. Heck
• Reading, Writing and Linguistics: Principles from the Little Red Schoolhouse by Gail Brandel Viechnicki
• Copious Reasoning: The Student Writer as an Astute Observer of Language by Todd Oakley
• Writing Well in an Unknown Language: Linguistics and Composition in an English Department by Victor Raskin
• Language and Literature
• Waterships All the Way Down: Using Science Fiction to Teach Linguistics by Suzette Haden Elgin
• In Fiction, Whose Speech, Whose Vision? by Elizabeth Closs Traugott
• The Poetics of Everyday Conversation by Deborah Tannen
• On Dictionaries and Grammars
• Who Wrote Your Dictionary?: Demystifying the Contents and Construction of Dictionaries by Sylvia Shaw
• Online Resources for Grammar Teaching and Learning: The Internet Grammar of English by Bas Aarts, Gerald Nelson, and Justin Buckley
• Index