The English language

About twenty years ago at a regional CEA meeting, I gave a talk on the subject Our Responsibility to the English Language. If you are curious about what I said, you will find it in the March, 1953, issue of College English. What it added up to in short was that English teachers should pay attention to what linguists were saying about language and take the responsibility for educating their students therein. I closed with the following four recommendations. 1. Every member of an English department-whether he teaches freshman composition, creative writing, literary criticism, or anything else-should be thoroughly grounded, either by academic training or personal study, in the methods, facts, and theories of modem linguistics. 2. Such grammar as is incorporated into the freshman course should be based upon the findings of modern scholars about the English language. This is at present virtually impossible, since among the myriads of freshman texts not one exists that is so based. Time will soon correct this deficiency, especially if we keep telling the publishers what we want. 3. Every undergraduate English department should offer at least two one-semester courses in English linguistics, the first dealing with the descriptive analysis of presentday English, the second with the historical development of English. These courses should certainly be required for all who intend to teach English; preferably they should be required for all English majors

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