Date: Mon, 25 Sep 1995 09:51:46 -0600
From: "Salikoko S. Mufwene" s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UCHICAGO.EDU
Subject: Re: Gen Ed Linguistics
In message Mon, 25 Sep 1995 08:19:16 -0400,
Wayne Glowka wglowka[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MAIL.GAC.PEACHNET.EDU writes:
The assistant dean at UGA
explained that no one has ever tried to make linguistics count as a social
science because the course is taught by members of the English department.
Then it must depend on where the class instructor is headquartered. When
I was at UGA and taught the "Study of Language" and "Languages of the
World," a lot of my students were Social Science and Education majors, often
more of them than Language majors. I was in the Department of Anthropology
and reviewed for promotion and tenure through the Social Sciences. I also
taught "Language and culture," which appealed to social science majors. I
had no more than two Language majors in several years of teaching this
class.
Here at Chicago there was, until last year, a course called Language,
which was intended for non-linguists and designed with more emphasis (at
least as I taught it) on aspects of language that would be appealing to
non-linguists. I covered language and culture/society (including language
and gender), language contact (including problems that dialectologists
seldom discuss about development of American English--but you got to like
heresies to do this!), child language, pragmatics, and a couple of other
things. I found Wardaugh's INVESTIGATING LANGUAGE a useful starting point
for discussions and assigned readings in Clark, Escholz, & Rosa's LANGUAGE,
before referring students to some other more specialized sources for
projects to work on.
Sali.
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Salikoko S. Mufwene s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uchicago.edu
University of Chicago 312-702-8531
Department of Linguistics FAX: 312-702-9861
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
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