Teaching the History of the English Language ed. by Colette Moore and Chris C. Palmer (review)

The one-semester History of the English Language (HEL) course is typically offered in an English department and often (if misleadingly) affiliated with the premodern curriculum. The thirty-eight contributors to this volume from the Modern Language Association's 'Options for Teaching' series address multiple, mostly US, pedagogical approaches. The volume continues earlier discussions about teaching HEL (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, 13.2 (2006), 14.1 (2007), 15.2 (2008), 18.1 (2011)). As reflective practitioners, the writers base their advice on their classroom experiences and challenges. With some exceptions, they present thoughtful, hands-on, sometimes transformative discussions of how to teach HEL with present-day students in various institutional contexts.

Essays are grouped into six topics focused on HEL pedagogy and curriculum: 'Issues and Definitions'; 'Considerations and Approaches for Historical Periods, Structuring a Course'; 'Unit Design and Teaching Strategies, Curricular Contexts, and Selected Resources'; and 'Assignments'. In US higher education, an HEL course is often situated in general education, or as part of an 'English language' or preservice English teaching requirement, or an historical linguistics course. The English language's long and increasingly global history problematizes each of these contexts. For these contributors, the challenge of teaching HEL with undergraduates is to bring the global historical arc of English and language change into the local classroom. Collectively, the essays make the case that an HEL course is not strictly a 'medieval' course, nor one which a medievalist should teach, nor one which is only about language in the past.

The consistent format of the essays (overview, specific unit ideas, example assignments or classroom activities) and their combination of the global and the local make the volume more coherent than it might otherwise be. Major linguistic questions are outlined in terms of language change (R. D. Fulk), variation (Elise E. Morse-Gagné; K. Aaron Smith and Susan Kim), standardization (Raymond Hickey), and internal/external historical approaches (Don Chapman; Joanna Kopaczyk and Marcin Krygier). Organizing course material with forward or reverse chronology is debated, but most writers prefer forward (inertia?). Some sidestep chronology by organizing a course around linguistic topics rather than historical periods. Reflecting on their successful or unsuccessful classroom experiences and assignments, most contributors stress that the principal course objective is to engage students with questions of language change and variation rather than mastery of historical and linguistic facts.

The strength of the collection is how it mixes curriculum contexts with the nuts and bolts of classroom practice. Annina Seiler explicitly challenges the forward chronology syllabus: 'I believe that reverse chronology better supports student development of problem-solving skills and effective learning strategies, […] focusing on global comprehension, or drawing on knowledge derived from Modern English' (p. 143). Others organize the course topically: core linguistics (Andrew J. Pantos and Wendolyn Weber), multilingualism (David Blackmore), history of the book (Sarah Noonan), prescriptivism (Anne Curzan), or local language ecology (Jennifer C. Stone). These syllabus plans provocatively connect the history of English with other literary, linguistic, and cultural questions and social activism.

Teaching units, assignments, and prerequisites are perennial challenges in HEL courses. John Newman succinctly rationalizes his course primer, which prioritizes 'degrees of diachronic reach and diachronic contrast' (p. 206) to bring all students up to speed. Other contributors outline how to create effective HEL assignments using diaries, letters, and other primary source materials (Kimberly Emmons, William Claspy, and Melissa A. Hubbard), dictionaries (Stefan Dollinger), translation projects (Megan E. Hartman), and invented language tasks (Tara Williams). Corpus linguists discuss how to develop HEL assignments and activities with the OED, DARE, Helsinki Corpus, and other corpora. All essays in the volume are supported on the MLA Commons online forum with additional resources, lesson plans, and assignments. Although addressed to English literature, English education, or general education students, these assignments can be adapted for students in an historical or...