LINGUIST List 22.2868 Tue Jul 12 2011 Disc: Re: High School Linguistics Editor for this issue: Elyssa Winzeler <elyssalinguistlist.org> New! Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:             http://multitree.linguistlist.org/ To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.cfm. Directory         1.     Suzi Loosen , Re: High School Linguistics Message 1: Re: High School Linguistics Date: 08-Jul-2011 From: Suzi Loosen <loosensayahoo.com> Subject: Re: High School Linguistics E-mail this message to a friend This post is a follow-up to a request for help that I made two years ago as I was working on designing a high school Linguistics course (http://linguistlist.org/sp/get-discussion.cfm?submissionid=217547)--thank you to everyone who contacted me with wonderful suggestions and support. This past spring, I taught Linguistics at Milwaukee School of Languages (a 6th-12th grade language immersion school within Milwaukee Public Schools) as an elective English course. There were 24 students in the class, mostly juniors and seniors, plus two sophomores. The major topics that we covered included units on Phonetics, Morphology, Language Acquisition, the History of English, and Sociolinguistics. The two main textbooks we used were ''An Introduction to Language'' by Fromkin, et al (there are wonderful PowerPoints that support the text that are available for instructors at the Cengage website), and ''Language Awareness,'' a collection of essays on language issues. The materials available on the PBS ''Do You Speak American?'' website and DVDs were also very useful. The students enjoyed ''The Linguists'' documentary and Daniel Everett's book ''Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes.'' In the beginning of the semester, the students worked on problems in preparation for the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad and were then disappointed when a snowstorm kept us from being able to compete. Students kept a notebook of ''Daily Language Observations'' where they recorded things about language that made them think, question, or laugh. At the end of the semester, students chose one of their language observations and designed a research project relating to the topic (example topics: awkward elevator silences, does being bilingual have an impact on GPA, how do magazines targeted at women differ in their use of adjectives from magazines targeted at men?). Students also did another research project earlier in the semester on a particular language. Each group of two picked a language out of a hat (Xhosa, Hungarian, Cherokee, Basque, Icelandic, Gaelic, etc.) and had to research background information on the language. They created a map to show where the language was spoken and found sound clips online so that the class could hear the language. They also had to project whether or not the language would still be alive in 100 years. We learned a lot from guest speakers--a local deejay came in to talk about censorship and language use on the radio, a former student from our school came in to teach us what he has learned about the languages of Mandarin and Arabic, our assistant principal came in to teach us about sign language, a local art professor came in to talk about the connection between art and language, and one of my friends from grad school came in to talk about cognitive linguistics. The activity that the students said they enjoyed the most was our ''Pidgin Dinner Party.'' One Friday students came to class dressed up and with food to share. They were seated next to people who did not speak the same second language that they did (in our class, we had speakers of Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Japanese, Hmong, and Igbo), and they had to figure out how to share a meal with each other without using any English. For the final exam, students answered a very open-ended essay prompt on what they learned by taking the course on Linguistics. Some of the comments that stand out that speak to the benefit of exposing high school students to Linguistics are: -''I learned to take time out of every day to see something new about language.'' -''Because of our exposure to Linguistics, we are able to perform better in our foreign language and English classes.'' -''I listen to the way language is spoken now, rather than state how it's supposed to be spoken. My favorite fact learned in Linguistics is that every single person has an idiolect, their own completely unique way of speaking.'' -''At first I thought that it seemed such a hopeless thing that languages that had been spoken in my lifetime could be dead before I graduate college. But I also thought about how that proves that language is a living thing, which is something we discussed early in the class. There's a cycle, and some languages die while others are still developing.'' -''Talking about how people talk to members of the opposite sex, how mothers and daughters speak to each other, and how the speech of people who belong to different social classes differs was not only interesting, but was also something I never expected to do with a class. I'd never been in a class that would have.'' -''We learned how to read, write, and understand IPA. We learned what a pidgin is and how it is formed. We learned Greek and Latin root words and disproved myths about language. We learned about accents and much more although I don't have nearly enough time to get into everything.'' -''This class opened my ears.'' -''Researching Arabic was one of the most interesting experiences I had in the class. With the new knowledge I have discovered about Arabic, I am now interested in learning how to speak it as well.'' -''We learned that infants in a sense are the best linguists, due to the fact that they can learn any language that is spoken to them.'' -''I originally had no clue how to 'observe language.' When my instructor initially explained it, I thought, 'Wow, this is the most tedious thing in the world.' But I was wrong! When I was going home that day, I overheard this phone conversation. This girl was saying that she was 'on the bus' and that she had been 'in the car' that morning. I thought to myself, 'Oh my gosh! Language Observation!' Why ''on''? Why ''in''? With that I hurried and wrote it down. The next day I explained to the class what I had observed and the response that I got was 'Wow, that's interesting' and we talked about why that might be. Since then I've been not only observing how people talk and what words people use, but I feel like I've been taught to ask 'Why?' and this alone is probably the most valuable thing that I've learned in this course.'' -''I loved thinking about the concept of there being languages with out a base-10 number system. Though it seems so strange to us, it's completely normal for some cultures. In the case of the Piraha tribe, they didn't even use numbers, just general estimations of the quantity of something. It brought about concepts that explored how differently you may perceive the world if you were native to a different language.'' -''I really appreciate the fact that we were able to take this class because now I'm considering taking Linguistics in college.'' -''Our class reached out to people to show them what IPA was. When our school had our annual Festival of Nations, students from our class made name tags for people in IPA. I thought this was interesting because some had never heard of this and our class was the first to tell them about it.'' -''Our Linguistics class became somewhat of a city of language, a metaphor created by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Every student brought their own brick.'' Linguistic Field(s): Discipline of Linguistics                             General Linguistics Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 12-Jul-2011       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.