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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