English 402 Language Term Projects

You are to write a paper of 6 - 8 pages (printed, double-spaced) on a topic that you will select but which I must approve. The following are some suggestions to get you started thinking about what to do. I encourage you to develop your own topic, however, and I will be glad to meet with you to help you think it through and to suggest resources for you to use. Take some time during the next few days to decide on a topic.

Topics: The best papers come from topics which you develop yourselves. Such topics should be fairly specific, within your resources, do-able in the time-frame provided, and related to some aspect of language. I will be happy to advise you on resources and topic development, and to answer any questions you have along the way.

Here are some suggestions to guide your thinking. They are ideas to get you started thinking. They are based on successful papers that students have done for this course in the past, and are not meant to limit your scope and range.

Questionnaires: students seem drawn to questionnaires, but in my experience, unless it is very carefully developed and administered in person, orally, a questionnaire won’t give you what you need to find out. So with certain cautions, I’d avoid them and think of other ways of gathering information, like conducting direct interviews.

1. A collection of campus slang.  Interview people to build up a collection of U of I campus slang focused on a particular topic.  You may wish to focus your investigation by defining a group, comparing the usage of two groups, selecting certain types of slang. Common categories include food and drink, entertainment, dating, social groups, academic situations. Slang terms for drug-related activities are over-studied and potentially dangerous, and not recommended here, nor, for the same reasons, are you advised to investigate the slang of criminals.

2. Language reform.  Study one aspect of language reform (spelling, grammar, vocabulary, usage, official English), tracing its development and its present status. There’s lots of library material available for this project. You’ll find a lot of weird suggestions, like the guy who proposed restoring gender to English nouns (but wanted 10-15 different genders, to accommodate the varieties of natural gender he observed), or the proposals to dump all borrowed words from English, replacing them with native ones. But you’ll also find that some reforms seek to solve thorny language problems, like spelling or racial and gender bias. Pick an aspect of reform, look at the proposals, evaluate the results, and discuss why they failed (yes, alas, they all fail), and what if any impact they’ve had on the language (even those that fail may affect our language use: we all use Ms., even if we don’t necessarily use it to mean what its creators intended, a marriage-neutral title for women)

3. Vocabulary change. Select a periodical from the 19th century to the present.  Study representative samples at fixed intervals (5 or 10 years, especially for recent periodicals) to determine changes in vocabulary, usage, and style in particular kinds of writing (editorials, features, reviews, fiction, sports, obituaries, financial, military, humor).

4. Word of the year. Just as Time magazine chooses a person of the year to celebrate in its first issue in January of the new year, very winter pundits like to announce their selection for word of the year. Look over the recent Word of the Year winners at the American Dialect Society Web site, http://www.americandialect.org/.  Check Merriam-Webster’s site for its woty choices.  What is your candidate for word or phrase of the year for 2006? What criteria might one set for choosing a “word of the year”? How do you go about researching a word or phrase that has had an appropriate impact? How do you report your findings?  How do you make your case?  How can you tell if the kids will dance to it?

5. Language and technology.  The invention of writing, and later, the invention of print technology, are often viewed as revolutions or at least milestones in the development of human cognition. In any case, they have both significantly changed the ways we do things with language. Now, with the computer revolution of the past generation, we hear claims again that a watershed, a milestone, a breakthrough, a revolution is occurring. You may wish to examine the computer revolution (so far as it concerns language use) in the context of the development of human language and literacy, together with its impact on the way we do things with words. How do computers affect the way we write? How do phenomena like email, newsgroups, real-time discussion forums, and hypertext change how we interact through the written word? You may wish to look at computer-related issues, like the so-called information glut; problems of authenticity and verification of virtual text; the development of computer-text genres and styles (email, IM, web pages); increasing concern for correctness on-line. Or you may wish to look at the impact of computers on education. 

6. Literacy and language.  Reading and writing, the fundamental aspects of literacy, turn out to be not so simple as we might have guessed. In the past we assumed that you could teach a person to read and write, and they could then read and write whatever they needed or wanted to. Now we are discovering that things aren’t quite so simple. Just because you can read doesn’t mean you can read the Tax Code or the manual that came with your word processor. Just because you can write doesn’t mean you can write the great American novel or term paper. Examine the current crisis-mentality approach to literacy in light of what psychologists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and political theorists are saying about Literacy with a capital L.

7. Language and society.  There is a vast bibliography on a variety of topics relating to sexism and language, and another huge set of resources dealing with African American English, or Ebonics. And of course there’s the whole language of immigrants issue that’s constantly paraded before us in the press. 

Your investigation might look at reforms intended to create fairer, more sex-neutral language, sexism in the English vocabulary, or male-female language differences.  You might consider the roles of nonstandard varieties like Ebonics; the political implications of suggesting that Ebonics is a language, not a dialect; the role of nonstandard varieties of language and the schools. Also under this heading are the various positions on bilingualism and bilingual education. What should schools do, if anything, to accommodate the needs of students whose native language is not English, or who may not have much English at all?  And of course there’s the official English thing, a topic we’ve touched upon regularly in class, because it’s always in the news.

8. The influence of English on other languages. Much has been written about how English borrows from other tongues. You might wish to examine how that process has come to be reversed now that English has become a “world” language. Not all of this influence is regarded as positive, and many critics are calling English a “colonizing” language instead. One topic combining this one with computers: the spread of English on the Internet, and reactions against its colonizing influence.

9. The standardization of English.  Since the 18th century, conscious, formal attempts to standardize English usage have become fairly common. The schools, the literary community, dictionaries, and occasionally the courts, have been involved in attempts to fix, ascertain, and regulate how the language is used. Examine some of the usage controversies, discuss the role of language education in the schools (whole language, phonics, speech therapy, spelling bees, good English week, and so on), look at language laws and court decisions relating to language (trademark, English-only, minority language rights, bilingual education, TESL).

10. Language in conflict.  When languages come into contact, that is usually a sign that cultures have come into conflict. While multilingualism may be inevitable, linguistic power struggles frequently accompany political, social, and economic revolutions, reforms, or invasions. Language conflict, for example, has become an important issue in Eastern Europe, in the former Soviet Union, in India, China, Canada, Indonesia, Belgium, Spain, Ireland, Scotland, the U.K., Australia, and, of course, in the U.S. Language becomes a personal conflict when immigrants to the U.S. face pressure to adopt English, and minority languages become endangered species. You might like to look at the Ebonics controversy, or the issue of language and Puerto Rican statehood. While there is a lot of library-related information to be gathered here, it may also be interesting to you to interview relatives or friends who have dealt personally with the problem of language preservation, language loss, and learning a new language in a new country.

11. World Englishes.  English is a world language. It is the language of most of the world’s mail, and three-fourths of its computer communications. It is estimated that as many as 750,000,000 people speak English to some extent. Because of its spread, some linguists have begun to speak of Englishes, rather than English. Local standards for English have existed for centuries in Scotland and Ireland, Canada and the U.S. More recently, local standards have developed in India, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand and Nigeria. English is often the medium of communication between people who have no language in common: Arabs and Israelis, Germans and Japanese, are likely to  communicate in English when they meet. Discuss the use of English internationally. Pick an area, or a type of communication. Examine the competition between American and British English for “world domination.” Examine how “English” is affected by its status as an international language.

12. Language and the public eye.  Examine other language-related issues of concern to the general public: the notion of linguistic decay; fear of language change; generational language issues; the spread of slang, cursing, and informal language in general; the role of the schools as guardians of language; notions of correctness vs. descriptions of the language people really use. Something that came up in the course of your “class expert” language-in-the-news segment might be expanded into a paper for the course.