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Teaching
Descriptive English Grammar
The New Genres of the Internet
Writing Technologies
History of the English Language
Research interests
The present state of the English language, its history and prospects for the future: the conflicting roles of English as international lingua franca and postcolonial tool of cultural and economic imperialism. Language legislation, policy and reform; minority languages and dialects; linguistic rights: in an age when diversity thrives, why don't we prize linguistic diversity? Reading, writing, and literacy: seen as essential tools of modernism, enlightenment and self-improvement, on the one hand, and powerful instruments of control and oppression on the other, we can't agree on how to define literacy, how to measure it, or what it's actually for, and while literacy levels are at an all-time high, we have lamented serious declines in literacy for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Technologies of communication: the machinery of writing, reading, and speaking shape our communication practices, and in turn are shaped by the needs of readers, writers, and speakers.Language and gender: whether or not women and men use language differently, we impose our ideas about gender on our ideas about language and communication. Writing studies: What writers do from the moment they receive (or think up) a writing task till the moment it's done (which raises the question, is a piece of writing ever really finished?).
Issues in higher education and teaching: The impact of high-stakes testing and outcomes assessment at the college level.
Publications
Books:The English-Only Question: An Official Language for Americans? New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990. Grammar and Gender. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986. Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982.Guide to Home Language Repair. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994.Declining Grammar and Other Essays on the English Vocabulary. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1988.Going Native: The Regeneration of Saxon English. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1982.
Recent Articles: “The New Technologies of the Word.” In Keith Walters and Michal Brody, eds., What’s Language Got to Do with It?” New York: W. W. Norton, 2005, pp. 136-51.“Language Legislation and Language Abuse: American Language Policy through the 1990s.” In Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives on the Official English Movement, vol. 2: History, Theory and Policy, ed. Roseann D. Gonzalez with Ildiko Melis (Urbana: NCTE, and Lawrence Earlbaum Assoc., 2001), pp. 5-29.“Ebonics and the Politics of English.” World Englishes 19 (March, 2000): 5-19. [What really happened in Oakland in 1996]“From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies.” In Passions, Pedagogies and 21st-Century Technologies, ed. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe (Logan: Utah State Univ. Press and the National Council of Teachers of English, 1999), pp. 15-33.“I’m not really a professor, I just play one on TV.” Inside Higher Education, Oct. 14, 2005. [How the media portrays higher education] “The College Board’s New Essay Reverses Decades of Progress Toward Literacy.” Chronicle of Higher Education. May 6, 2005. [Why the new SAT writing test is an ineffective measure of competence]“The Tongue Who Would Be King.” Science and Spirit, November/December 2004, pp. 28-33. [English as a world language] “The President’s Reading Lesson.” Education Week, Sept. 8, 2004, p. 43. [Politics and reading instruction came to a head when George Bush observed Florida second graders on the morning of 9/11]“No Translation Needed: ‘Door Is Closed.’” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2004, M5. [What the 2000 Census tells us about language use in the US]“McLanguage Meets the Dictionary.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Dec. 19, 2003, B14. [Can a trademark owner control how we use words?] “Will Anyone Accept the Good News on Literacy?” Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 1, 2002, B10. [A new look at the mistakes of the National Adult Literacy Survey] “America Doesn’t Know What the World Is Saying.” The New York Times, Oct. 27, 2001, A21. [Can a monolingual America prosper after 9/11?] “To Sir, or Ma’am, with Love.” Education Week. Sept. 8, 1999, 45. [When it comes to linguistic control, schools really are like prisons after all] “Lingua Blanka: Official English? Let’s Be Done With the Poor Old Mother Tongue.” The Washington Post Sunday, Sept. 8, 1996, C5. [A Modest Proposal: Don’t make English official, ban it instead]“Language, Culture, and Society,” in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. Joseph Gibaldi. 2nd ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992), pp. 28-52.“Why Do Academics Continue to Insist on `Proper’ English?” Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 July, 1992, B1-2.
“The Epicene Pronoun: The Word That Failed,” American Speech 56 (1981), pp. 83-97. [80+ proposals for a gender-neutral pronoun in the past 150 years, but we're still not there yet]
Current projects
From Pencils to pixels: Communicating in the digital age. A book-length study of the impact of communication technologies on reading and writing from the invention of writing to the digital age.
What writers do. A study of writing processes.
Professional activities
Professional consulting on issues of language, reading, and writing.
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University of Illinois