What does it mean to “disinvent” a language?

The title of our project, Disinventing Old English, pays homage to Sinfree Makoni and Alistair Pennycook’s landmark 2006 collection Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages, which forms the conceptual basis for imagining revisions to Old English language pedagogy. Applied linguists Makoni and Pennycook argue that the discipline of linguistics, the creation of language-learning pedagogies, and the modern concept of “language” itself “are inventions” which occur simultaneously with the invention of the nineteenth–century nation and European colonialism.[2] Following Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs,[3] Makoni and Pennycook explain that these nineteenth-century linguistic projects suture languages to historical, geographic, and racial territories. Moreover, they theorize that unmooring languages from these sites requires “strategies of disinvention and reconstruction,” which include changes to the name given to a language; its grammars, dictionaries, and edited texts; and the ways in which scholars conceptualize linguistic and dialectal difference.[4]

Why does Old English need to be disinvented?

Traditional Old English pedagogy—which revolves around noun and verb paradigm memorization; dense (sometimes unhelpfully so) grammatical explanations; constant and, at times, lengthy translation activities; and an aesthetics of cognitive rigor that values difficulty for difficulty’s sake—is based in outmoded nineteenth and early-twentieth century Latin and Greek models of language learning. Textbooks published over the past twenty years have openly recognized some of these problems and sought to make Old English more approachable for contemporary students.[5] These were important and critical steps forward, and this project stands on the shoulders of Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English, Bob Hasenfratz and John Jambeck’s Reading Old English, Carole Hough and John Corbett’s Beginning Old English, and Murray McGillivray’s Broadview Old English Grammar. These textbooks (along with Baker and McGillivray’s companion websites) make changes to linguistic terminology, grammatical explanations, and the literal “heft” of the textbook to render Old English a more approachable subject. However, there has been no systematic shift in the pedagogy of Old English. While individual teachers, many of whom we cite below, have done their part to transform Old English in the classroom, the textbooks and anthologized texts by which we teach Old English remain, to a large extent, unchanged for generations of teachers and students. These texts revolve around the monolithic linguistic concept of “the paradigm” (and its memorization), the Grammar-Translation approach, and the all-important issue of nomenclature.

As Haruko Momma, quoting Thomas Kuhn, asserts, “a paradigm ‘need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted’,”[6] yet paradigms create the illusion of a linguistically unified Old English (an illusion that instructors are always explaining away to students whenever exceptions crop up in an Old English reading). Alistair Pennycook, following Suresh Canagarajah, calls for linguists to view language structure not as a product located in the mind of the speaker but as a “social process constantly reconstructed in sensitivity to environmental factors.”[7] When understood as a process, Pennycook argues, language yields far more space for people, diversity, other modes of language use, desire, and action. What would it mean for Old English teachers to examine and potentially rethink our pedagogical relationship to paradigms? How might such reconsiderations lead to a very different, process-based understanding of the language we teach and research? What effects could it have on our students and future scholars? Bob Hasenfratz, for example, argues that paradigms (and Grammar-Translation, which we discuss below) are outdated, and he sketches a “fantasy textbook” that “would introduce simplified readings that would encourage students to build both linguistic and cultural ‘competence’ on their own.”[8]

Like paradigm memorization, the Grammar-Translation approach has been, historically, a central aspect of Old English instruction and derives from traditional modes of Latin and Greek language learning. Yet the history of this feature of Old English pedagogy has a checkered past. Meant to elevate English as a cultural language on par with Classics, in the nineteenth century, Grammar-Translation draped Old English in the garments of cultural prestige by way of its instructional association with Latin and Greek. More troubling, still, Grammar-Translation in these nineteenth-century classrooms implicitly advocated a pedagogy of cognitive “rigor,” the origins of which were tethered to a presumed racial supremacy of “Anglo-Saxon” habits of mind.[9] Like many Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Old Norse, Old Irish, and Middle Welsh textbooks, contemporary grammatical introductions to Old English continue to follow the Grammar-Translation approach. Yet there are changes in the wind. Instructors of ancient languages have begun to reassess their teaching in relation to second-language learning pedagogies,[10] and a small, yet vocal minority of university instructors in Ancient Greek[11] and Biblical Hebrew[12] advocate for second, or “living,” language pedagogies that emphasize the “communicative approach” rather than Grammar-Translation.[13] These instructors highlight not only the importance of listening, speaking, and writing in a second language but also of learning about its culture and arts and of attending to gesture and affect.

Yet, there are glimpses that Old English has begun to pivot in new directions. As Haruko Momma notes in her response to the 2015 special issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART)—titled “Old English Across the Curriculum—Contexts and Pedagogies,”– there is a “collective feeling that Old English pedagogy is at a crossroads today.”[18] In that issue, Martin Foys pitched the idea of performing short Old English texts in the classroom, Peter Baker signalled the possibilities of translating modern English into Old English, and Nienke Venderbosch explained how a digital “language bank” could help students add depth to their learning. Recently, Christopher Fee has discussed how to couple digital archaeological tools with Old English texts in order to facilitate “student-centered” learning[15]; Helen Brookman and Olivia Robinson have advocated for the value of creative, collaborative translation in beginning Old English courses[16]; and Thijs Porck’s YouTube channel features not only “Grammar Bytes” (small grammar lessons that signal a flipped classroom pedagogy) but also communicative approaches to and cultural aspects of Old English.[17] These examples point the way towards a comprehensive re-thinking of the textbooks we use not only for the benefit of a better learning experience but moreover to banish worn-out pedagogies (and the exclusionary ideological principles that not-infrequently accompany them) from our twenty-first century classrooms. Perhaps, then, with Bob Hasenfratz, it would be a good time to rethink our own materials in the classroom. In his self-reflective statement regarding the pedagogy of Reading Old English, he did not mince words:  “Dear God, were we completely wrong?”[19]

While there are other pedagogical issues that need redressing,[20] among the most urgent concerns regarding Old English pedagogy is, perhaps, a reassessment of its nomenclature. In addition to the immediate need for a textbook that scrubs the terms “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxonist” from its lexicon and, in the process, writes a different, non-insular and global history of early medieval England, it is incumbent upon teacher-scholars of Old English to take a hard look at the term we use to reference this language. As the field knows, old-middle-modern Englishes function as a linguistic progress narrative and evolutionary taxonomy that developed apace the colonial-racial progress narratives of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century writings in history and biology. Consequently, the semantic weight of “Old” English–not unlike that of “Anglo-Saxon”–may very well burden our teaching with invisible ideological freight.[21] One might argue that it’s no wonder our textbooks–comprised almost exclusively of paradigms, grammar instruction, and texts to be translated–do not reflect the contemporary practices of teachers and classrooms. The term “Old English” originates in and therefore gravitates towards these colonial-racial and heteronormative ideologies. Whether we choose to keep or jettison these terms is a question for the field, but Disinventing Old English believes it deserves serious consideration.

What are the alternatives to traditional Old English pedagogy?

While teacher-scholars such as Peter Baker, Bob Hasenfratz, Murray McGillivray, Haruko Momma, Thijs Porck, and many others mentioned above (and cited below) offer excellent paths forward, Disinventing Old English also looks to recent discussions in Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, and Old Norse instruction. Instructors in these languages advocate for pedagogies that emerge from second-language learning models. One, the “comprehensible input” method popularized by Stephen Krashen, allows language learners to comprehend the meaning of a communication in the second language without necessarily understanding every part of the grammatical complexity.[22] Another closely related framework called “communicative language teaching” advocates for a written, spoken, and listening component even to languages presumed to be “dead.”[23] Further, Maite Correa has argued persuasively that language-learning classrooms benefit from the “flipped” classroom model, privileging what Paulo Freire referred to as a problem-posing education in which an instructor facilitates knowledge rather than a banking model of education in which the instructor transmits knowledge.[24] By focusing on practice rather than explanation, this model allows language learners to retain more of the material that they are expected to work with.[25] 

Furthermore, and most importantly, students must feel safe and supported within the classroom environment in order to deliver on our aspirations for a “disinvented” Old English. In order to do this, we must focus our efforts not only on rethinking how to present and deliver grammatical content but also on how to draw Old English instruction, consciously and with intentionality, within the orbit of inclusive, anti-racist, feminist, and intersectional pedagogies.[26] As Elizabeth R. Miller, Brian Morgan, and Adriana L. Medina write, language instruction is an act of “ethical self-formation.”[27] We must be attentive to how our methods and pedagogies can open and close doors for our students[28]. Part of this requires taking a hard look at the anthologized selection of texts that are frequently presented to early learners, many of which privilege an English subject, while making other parts of the world distant and exotic. Disinventing Old English aims to take into account the way pre-Conquest England was but one part of a larger world and knew it. To these ends, in addition to revising the grammar modules of Old English, the textbook and workbook of Disinventing Old English may include short discussions of cultural artifacts, historical figures, and key events as part of the language-learning experience in order to stress the broader sociocultural context of Old English. These discussions open outward from previous Old English textbooks, bringing them up to date with cutting-edge research in the global Middle Ages and hemispheric studies.

Citations

[2] Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, “Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages,” in Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007), 1.

[3] Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[4] Makoni and Pennycook, “Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages” in Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (Clevendon: Multilingual Matters, Ltd., 2007), 27.

[5] Andrew Scheil, “Old English Textbooks and the 21st Century: A Review of Recent Publications,” Old English Newsletter 40.3 (Spring 2007): 47-59.

[6] Haruko Momma, From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 65; Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 18.

[7] Alastair Pennycook, Language As A Local Practice (London: Routledge, 2010), 9; quoting Suresh Canagarajah, “The Ecology of Global English,” International Multilingual Research Journal 1(2) (2007): 94.

[8] Bob Hasenfratz, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 22.2 (2015): 58. Hasenfratz alongside a number of graduate students at the University of Connecticut began working on alpha versions of lesson plans and launched the Old English Collaborative Education Online in 2013. Unfortunately, their project has not moved forward.

[9] For a lengthy discussion of the relationship between Old English pedagogy and colonial modes of “being” see Donna Beth Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures (earth: punctum books, 2019), 235-8.

[10] For example, Doug Clapp prefaces his review of five, recently-published beginning Latin textbooks with his own readings in second-language acquisition in “De Lingua Latina Discenda Five Recent Textbooks for Introductory Latin,” Teaching Classical Languages 5.1 (Fall 2013): 50-69; and Daylin L. Oakes’s dissertation, “Teaching Latin as a Living Language: Reviving Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Pedagogy for the Modern Classroom,” builds an extensive case for appropriating 2L pedagogy in Latin instruction (Tempe: Arizona State University, 2017). To these, we would add Jesse Byock’s Viking Language series (Jules William Press, 2015-17).

[11] See, for example, Micheal Palmer, “Living Language in the Written Text at SBL 2018,” Greek Language and Linguistics https://www.greeklanguage.blog/?p=2851.

[12] Sarah Lynn Baker, “Uploading Hebrew: The Transformation of the Language Classroom,” https://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/abstract.aspx?id=47989.

[13] Paul Overland, Lee Fields, and Jennifer Noonan, “Can Communicative Principles Enhance Classical Language Acquisition?,” Foreign Language Annals 44.3 (2011): 583–598.

[15] Christopher Fee, “Student-Centered, Interactive Teaching of the Anglo-Saxon Cult of the Cross,” Old English Newsletter 45.3 (2014).

[16] Helen Brookman and Olivia Robinson, “Creativity, Translation, and Teaching Old English Poetry,” Translation and Literature 25.3 (2016): 275-297.

[17] Thijs Porck, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIh0ZR1WZhzhQf5WIkkGeUA; see also Porck and Jodie Mann’s essay on this use of new media produced by instructors and their students in “Blanded Leornung: Three Digital Approaches to Teaching Old English,” TOEBI Newsletter 34 (2017): 5-13.

[18] Martin K. Foys, “Hwæt sprycst þu?: Performing Ælfric’s Colloquy,” SMART 22.2 (2015): 67-71; Peter Baker, “On Writing Old English,” SMART 22.2 (2015): 31-40; Nienke C. Venderbosch, “The Learning Bank as a Tool for Active Learning,” SMART 22.2 (2015): 63-65.

[19] Haruko Momma, “Afterword: By All Means,” SMART 22.2 (2015): 96; Bob Hasenfratz, “Paradigm Bashing: Challenges to Teaching and Learning Old English in the Twenty-First Century,” SMART 22.2 (2015): 58.

[20] While the corpus of Old English as it exists in manuscripts is rich in dialectal variety, textbooks usually present Old English in the late West Saxon dialect when teaching all grammatical principles and remove or omit all dialectal variations from their sample texts for student translation exercises. Although these editorial practices are helpful to learners who are new to Old English (because the normalizations to a standard dialect reduce the number of variant forms beginners have to learn), they have led generations of students and scholars to hold an incorrect view of the language itself. These choices thus create a false sense of a homogenous Old English language and culture—and, importantly, one traditionally affiliated with the imperial-minded King Alfred. Likewise, the superabundance of martial terms in practice texts and practice sentences encode presumptions about white masculinity in Old English readings, see Robin Norris, “Crossing Borders in Old English Hagiography,” TOEBI Newsletter 35 (2018): 4.

[21] On the racism of “Anglo-Saxon” see Mary Rambaram-Olm, “Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting “Anglo-Saxon” Studies,” History Workshop, November 4, 2019; Eric Wade (@eric_kaars), Twitter, September 11, 2019; September 20, 2019; October 27, 2019; Catherine Karkov, “Post ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Melancholia,” Medium December 10, 2019; and Donna Beth Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures (earth: punctum books, 2019). On the colonial origins and language politics of “Old English” see Donna Beth Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures (earth: punctum books, 2019), 288-292.

[22] Stephen Krashen’s research is laid out in Stephen D. Krashen and Tracy D. Terrell, The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom (Phoenix ELT, 1988).

[23] Jacqueline M Carlon, “The Implications of SLA Research for Latin Pedagogy: Modernizing Latin Instruction and Securing Its Place in Curricula,” Teaching Classical Languages 4.2 (2013): 106-122. 

[24] Maite Correa, “Flipping the Foreign Language Classroom and Critical Pedagogies: A (New) Old Trend,” Higher Education for the Future 2.2 (July 1, 2015): 118-9, https://doi.org/10.1177/2347631115584122.

[25] Correa, 120.

[26] Melissa Jacquart et al., “Diversity Is Not Enough: The Importance of Inclusive Pedagogy,” Teaching Philosophy 42.2 (2019): 107–139, https://doi.org/10.5840/teachphil2019417102.

[27] Elizabeth R. Miller, Brian Morgan, and Adriana L. Medina, “Exploring Language Teacher Identity Work as Ethical Self-Formation,” The Modern Language Journal 101. s1 (2017): 91–105, https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12371. We will also draw on work by UAA Difficult Dialogues to help users of our texts enter into this work with more awareness of their own position in the classroom.

[28] See Nahir I. Otaño Gracia’s poem “Old English is Mine!” in/and “Old English is Mine!”: Diversity and Old English Old English” parts 1 and 2, Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife [blog], October 16, 2016 (https://grendelsmotherthenovel.com/2016/10/06/old-english-is-mine-diversity-and-old-english/)  and December 5, 2017 (https://grendelsmotherthenovel.com/2017/12/05/old-english-is-mine-diversity-and-old-english-part-2/); Dorothy Kim, “Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy,” In The Middle [blog], August 27, 2017, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/08/teaching-medieval-studies-in-time-of.html; and Peter Baker, “Anglo-Saxon Studies After Charlottesville: Reflections of a University of Virginia Professor,” Medievalists of Color [blog], May 25, 2018, https://medievalistsofcolor.com/race-in-the-profession/anglo-saxon-studies-after-charlottesville-reflections-of-a-university-of-virginia-professor/ .