Linguistics in the Curriculum
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10013586 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thomas D Cravens (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1996 |
| Volume | 73 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 465 |
| Publication date | 1996-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Italica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-3020 • E-ISSN: 2325-6672 |
| Publisher | University of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/479501 |
| OpenAlex | W297815597 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 4 |
W e might quibble with the author regarding the first part of the above statement, but many who read these words will no doubt agree that the vast majority of people, and not just know deplorably little about either language in general, or in particular. Stalker's central point is that this is in part the result of unfortunate lacunae in the general university curriculum, and leads to an inability of the educated public to address language issues from an informed point of view. It may be tempting to view this as a minor problem. The undergraduate who takes a degree in Business, Statistics, or Dairy Science will suffer little in his or her personal or professional life as a result of having no more linguistic knowledge than that required for the practical skills of writing and speaking in a standard mode. Even the graduate in Journalism or Communications can succeed with fatuous notions about language, troubled, if at all, by little more than minor anxiety over the prescriptive status of individual words or peculiar turns of phrase. The effect of ignorance is less benign to society as a whole if the Journalism graduate makes a secondary career of propounding impressionistic fancy in the mode of Edwin Newman (1974), but such cases are rare. If we restate Stalker's claim to focus on the language field, substituting students of foreign languages for Americans, the conclusions are more disturbing. Students of language and neophyte language teachers are, indeed, very fond of talking and thinking about language, yet it is possible to complete not just a BA in a language department, but the entire sequence through doctoral studies, and still remain remarkably unknowledgeable about language in general and Italian (or German, French, etc.) in particular. If the lack of linguistic education in schools and the general undergraduate curriculum is curious and perhaps unfortunate, the same lacuna in graduate programs purporting to have a major component consisting of language study is ominous, for here the repercussions can be genuinely lamentable, especially for those who teach language, or soon will
Curriculum · Epistemology · Foreign language · Ignorance · Journalism · Linguistics · Mathematics education · Media studies · Minor (academic) · Pedagogy · Phrase · Point (geometry) · Political science · Sociology · Statement (logic) · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Law · Lexicography and Language Studies · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,08 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2014 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |