Last Thursday I attended a lecture given by the renowned and respected linguist David Crystal. The audience was thrilled by his very entertaining, or rather: edutaining, speech. This gives me courage to continue developping ideas for “linguistic edutainment” — also for an expert audience.
Moreover, David Crystal also called for a new kind of Historical English Linguistics, namely Applied Historical English Linguistics. He talked about how he taught Shakespearean pronunciation to a theater group. This is something that I was already asked for a few years ago (however, not for the performance of an entire drama, but for the performance of 2 Shakespearean sonnets). Apart from that, there is more that can be understood under Applied Historical English Linguistics – e.g. teaching knowledge of historical linguistics that teachers need to answer frequent learner questions. This is something I’ve been teaching as a course for several years. The course is also on the English Wikiversity since 2007:
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Applied_historical_English_linguistics
Joachim Grzega
