‎The advice offered by Professors Adamson and Sayers would be very appropriate.

The metaphor idea and the cognitive idea should be very informative to the audience.

The English Club will have people who would be motivated by the concerns of written expression.

I will present an opinion, too. I am not a professor of Linguistics yet but ‎I am in a second MA program (English Composition). My college degree and my first MA were in Linguistics. 

In college in the early 1980s, as a Linguistics major, I found myself doing uncannily well with Mandarin. It was not my first foreign language and perhaps that fact is relevant to an extent. 

Anyway, Linguistics studies the phenomena of language. A phenomenon that I think would be relevant to the ‎English Club students who want to know something of Linguistics is as follows :

Many languages do not use the alphabet as we English speakers know it (and some of us English speakers have as the L1 a language that uses a non-Roman-alphabet-based writing system): Korean, Hindi, Arabic...and Mandarin Chinese are examples. 

Chinese is unique in the group of such languages because each Chinese character refers to a particular spoken syllable and the 'how do you pronounce that character' thing is not necessarily indicated by the glyph. Korean is completely different because contemporary Korean has a very close correspondence between the pronunciation and the written form (written Korean is kind of an alphabet and written Chinese is not an alphabet).

Japanese is kind of in the middle of the schema, with its Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana indication the how of the pronunciation (most of the Kanji, which derive from Chinese characters, no).
‎
Hindi, Arabic, etc., are generally very good at representing the how of the sound, but beyond this I do not know. 

After this long-winded introduction, back to English. The numbers 0 - 10 (and all of them really) are similarly like written Chinese and not like anything else. How do you say 2 in English? Two. But that 2 glyph does not signal how the pronunciation should be. I only know 'two' because I learned the pronunciation long ago.

This very specific Linguistics - studied phenomenon might well be of some interest to the literature students. 

Another thing, a less technical thing, is that Composition scholars do study the question of style and the issue of 'why is some written language better..expressed in a smoother fashion, or more efficient fashion, or considered by experts to be better somehow.'

Indeed, 'Stylistics' is a subfield of both English and Linguistics. 

Jim Jones, Freelance Translator and Editor 
Atanet.org‎, Chinese to English Language Chair 

AB uChicago, MA NEIU

1: Chinese, German, and Spanish to English
2: Editing, English
3: Mandarin tutoring and consulting, English tutoring, and some Spanish tutoring.

Articles and Cartoons have appeared in the ATA newsletter of the Chinese Language Division.

Three hour training for experienced translators on the new Chinese to English certification at ATA60 on the morning of October 23: AST-7 on AST Day [https://www.atanet.org/conf/2019/astday/]

Last October: Presented 60 minute workshop at ATA59, on Chinese to English translation and ATA Certification: my team's efforts had been approved at ATA58.

... by English Club at my dept to present about what linguistics is, 
> basically to see if they could be interested. I'm at Englosh Dept that only offers a 
> few upper level ling classes (I teach them all). There is no ling major or minor, 
> English majors usually come to my classes with absolutely no prior knowledge of ling.
> 
> I get about 30-40 minutes for this presentation , and would like to make it engaging 
> to them and hopefully spark interest in...

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