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This chapter discusses the incorporation of World Englishes into a History of the English Language (HEL) course, addressing questions about how to grapple with the geographical and geopolitical planes along which World Englishes have grown. Other questions considered here include diachronic formation, cultural contexts, relationships with other languages, and effects of globalization on forms of English that are both related to and yet quite distinct from the model of Standard English that frequently orients the HEL course. Two possible strategies for incorporating World Englishes into an HEL course are suggested. One strategy consists of focused lectures on the external history, social and cultural influences, linguistic features, and so on, of just one or two World English varieties, which can be combined with a second strategy that involves handing the research and even some of the teaching over to the students.

This chapter appeals to the early reception history of Beowulf to show why Old English remains an integral part of the history of the English language. It explains via examples how even a small amount of knowledge of the vernacular of England before 1066 is advantageous for the study of English from later periods and different geographical locations. As implied by its aliases “Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxon,” Beowulf’s language was not recognized as English until the 1870s. Nineteenth-century philology gave rise not only to Beowulf studies but also to the history of English as we know it. This chapter compares publications on the history of the English language as a case study to show how the approach to the subject changed after the introduction of the “new philology” in the nineteenth century.

Instructors teaching the History of the English Language (HEL) will well recognize the challenge of covering its broad chronological scope. Additionally, convenient fictions about discrete historical periods and the uniformity of linguistic changes across synchronic varieties make chronological organization of a HEL course a problematic device. This chapter speaks to how an instructor could engage students in thinking critically about HEL’s chronological conventions by framing the course around a specific diachronic textual tradition. The author offers a practical example: a sequence of exercises based on vernacular translations of the “Shepherd Psalm.” Additionally, the chapter demonstrates how an instructor teaching HEL to literature students can get them to attend more closely to questions about language.

This introductory chapter addresses the challenges and opportunities that come with teaching the History of the English Language (HEL). HEL is a traditional course whose instructors are tasked with balancing a great number of institutional, curricular, and student needs. Additionally, the course’s prodigious subject poses challenges for new as well as veteran instructors, few of whom have comprehensive training in English linguistics, literature, and the language’s historical varieties. The course encompasses a broad chronological, geographic, and disciplinary scope and, in the twenty-first-century classroom, has come to account for English’s transformative relationship with the internet and social media. In Approaches to Teaching the History of the English Language, experienced instructors explain the influences and ingenuity behind their own successful pedagogical practices. This introduction explains the value of that approach. Additionally, it includes a survey of the volume’s scope and organization.

This chapter addresses how the history of English as a linguistic topic has been taught in one South African university. The author focuses on the traditional Old–Middle–Modern English trichotomy as well as colonial and postcolonial synchronic varieties. Subsequent to a curricular shift from historical to applied linguistics in English departments, students taking History of the English Language (HEL) come to the course with little or no background in Old and Middle English. The author offers practical examples of how he accommodated this change in student preparation. Additionally, he addresses how the postcolonial era and globalisation have “revitalised the story of English.” Pidgins, Creoles, and World Englishes problematise the earlier genealogy of the Standard Language, making a linear history less easy to uphold. The author’s discussion of his complementary “Pidgins, Creoles, and New Englishes” course includes helpful pointers to instructors teaching these varieties within a HEL course.

This chapter summarizes recent scholarship on the history of philology and literary theory, and on calls for a “return to philology.” It explains the potential usefulness of theoretical questions for teaching the History of the English Language (HEL). It summarizes a set of relevant theoretical issues for organizing a HEL curriculum along a series of contrasts and self-critical questions: synchrony vs. diachrony; content vs. structure; levels of change; conscious vs. unconscious variation; stability vs. instability; standard vs. nonstandard; language difference and identity. The chapter then presents a series of sample inquiries and resources for foregrounding these issues in teaching practice. It concludes with a summary set of practical observations about teaching outcomes for promoting greater discourse awareness through HEL, and the potential scope for further theoretical elaboration in HEL teaching.

Students taking the History of the English Language (HEL) may find old texts in strange writing or phonological charts less engaging than the language’s sounds. This chapter explains the pedagogical value of the “verbal music” of the English language at various periods. With particular attention to the language’s rhythms, the author argues for the value of oral performances to the “auditory imagination” that can be developed in a HEL classroom. Historical reconstructions of the language’s earlier sounds may not be perfect. But as a pedagogical device, performances of earlier Englishes convey a fact about language that charts and diagrams do not: its use by living speakers.

This chapter discusses teaching the History of the English Language (HEL) as a sociolinguist and being guided by three areas in learning sciences: goals, self-regulated learning, and interest, particularly social and personal. Specifically, this chapter addresses the age-old student question, “How is this relevant to me?” Part of our job as college teachers involves getting students to realize the practicality of a course for their needs (e.g., “I need to take this class in order to graduate”), and another part is to acknowledge (or awaken in some cases) their intellectual curiosity (e.g., “I’ve always wondered why “knight” is spelled with letters that aren’t even pronounced”). This chapter provides examples of instruction and assignments that correspond to research literature on goals and interest with respect to teaching and self-regulated learning more broadly and teaching HEL from the perspective of a sociolinguist more specifically.

In this chapter, the author reflects on his initial experience in teaching the History of the English Language (HEL) after years of writing on affiliated topics. He thus addresses a challenge familiar to HEL instructors: how to capitalize on one’s particular professional strengths while attending to the various topics covered in a wide-ranging course. In this reflective chapter, the author offers some practical advice for teaching Old English, accounting for how students regard language versus how trained linguists do so, and using etymology as a device to pique students’ general interest in the HEL subject as well as to introduce substantial lessons.