Wayne O’Neil has recently returned from his annual (since 2000) March stay in Seattle, where he and his partner Maya Honda spent several days doing linguistics with David Pippin’s fourth- and fifth-graders at St Thomas School in Medina WA. On this occasion, ‘doing linguistics’ focused on some aspects of English orthography: why, example, civil, solemn, and moral are spelt the way they are. However, Wayne was also required to give a spirited reading of the opening lines of Beowulf as a lead-in to a discussion of the history of the English language.
Some of the work that Wayne and Maya have done in Seattle over the past decade is discussed in Honda, O’Neil, and Pippin’s paper “On promoting linguistics literacy: Bringing language science to the English classroom”, in Kristin Denham and Anne Lobeck (ed.) Linguistics at school: Language awareness in primary and secondary education, 175-188 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).