Teachers of English require knowledge and skills in many areas, including literature, wring. and language. In this book, we approach the last of these areas not simply as a means for teaching the first two, but rather, as a topic worthy of serious study in itself We have attempted to provide future teachers with the fundamentals that they will need to explore, along with their students, the nature of language and the nature of the English language particularly its grammar and its meaning systems. Any further extension of language study to literature or composition, we believe, will be successful only insofar as it rests upon deep understanding of language in its many forms.