Hi Dave



I am currently teaching a course that covers history of English, development of Standard English, global spread of English, development of regional varieties (focusing on the Pacific, where I'm based), and general 'why is English so powerful today?' type topics. Each unit ends with a Moodle-based discussion forum, which gets them to reflect on things they've discovered about English, leading to interesting discussions about whether borrowing from English into Pacific languages is the same as borrowing from French into English; the realisation that there are also debates in Britain about 'falling standards'; considerations of why people accept both US and UK English, but won't entertain the idea that there could be a stable variety of e.g. Tongan English; and so on. They have a small amount of credit attached to each forum just to make them do them, but then they feed into a major assignment later in the semester. Part 1 of the major assignment requires them to compile extracts from throughout the semester (their own or others'), and use these extracts to draw together some key themes that we've been reflecting on. Part 2 is then more of a traditional essay that starts from the point that "English" turns out to be a lot more complex than we had realised - it's usually a question about appropriate ways to teach English in the Pacific, but the same approach could be applied to any topic.



Not sure if this is something that you could adapt to your course, but I find that students get so engrossed in the small discussions for each unit, that they find they've already done half of the major assignment by the time they get there. By forcing them to go back through all the posts again, pick out the highlights, and synthesis key themes, they do then revisit the earlier ideas in the essay. You can use things like Mahara e-portfolios to import relevant posts, or just literally re-read and copy paste.



I'd be interested to try getting my students to search for more primary sources by themselves like you do. Not tried that. If you'd be willing to share any notes you've already got that direct students on how to do this, I'd appreciate that! Also, if you had to pick which of the databases are most useful for this purpose, that would be handy too, as I don't think I currently have access to many of them but could potentially request some.



Thanks

Fiona



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Subject: TEACHLING Digest - 6 Feb 2018 to 7 Feb 2018 (#2018-11)



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Topics of the day:



  1. historical discussions of English



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Date:    Wed, 7 Feb 2018 09:05:53 +0000

From:    Dave Sayers <[log in to unmask]>

Subject: historical discussions of English



Hi TeachLingers,



Every year I run a first-year seminar where students use a series of historical online databases (https://www.gale.com/primary-sources/catalog,

http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/news/newspdigproj/burney/,

http://gale.cengage.co.uk/times.aspx/,

http://www.jischistoricbooks.ac.uk/Search.aspx, https://archive.org/,

https://openlibrary.org/) as well as a few specific digitised books (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LRNJAAAAcAAJ,

https://openlibrary.org/books/ia:arteofenglishpoe00putt/,

https://archive.org/details/generaldictionar00sher) to rummage around for primary material demonstrating historical debate about Standard English. (A sub-topic which is a very rich vein is spelling reform - a burst of books and articles in late C19, now almost all completely forgotten!) I get them to share the examples they find in a little discussion forum I make for them in Blackboard, and they can see each others work and compare.



It's a nice interesting exercise, but the problem is it doesn't seem to really stick with them. They don't take the opportunity to return to these resources for their essays, or subsequently show any evidence that the exercise ever happened! Moreover, it feels like it lacks structure and direction somehow. They collect interesting examples, but I haven't quite managed to give it a clear enough purpose or end goal, either within the seminar or afterwards.



Does anyone do anything similar to this, and have tips for clearer learning outcomes, and making the whole thing more memorable?



Thanks in advance!



Dave



--

Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132 Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk Communications Secretary, BAAL Language Policy group | www.langpol.ac.uk [log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers



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