Education Commons^™

Linguistic Advocacy As A Bridge Between Disciplines, David Bowie, Clare Dannenberg

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

Linguistics involves, at its core, advocacy for a key part of human existence: No matter our linguistic specialty, we advocate for human language on a variety of different levels from the social and political to the scientific. Certainly, as educators, our position as advocates leaks into our pedagogy as we try to instill in our students both the rote knowledge of our discipline and also the responsibility of utilizing that knowledge in the “real world.” Many of us even create assignments that engage our students to become real-world advocates, and yet these assignments may remain within the silos of our …

Linguistic Foundations For L2 Pronunciation Teaching, Kathy L. Sands

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

In this session I present a course I am proposing (and will pilot in short form this summer in Mongolia) entitled “Linguistic Foundations for L2 Pronunciation Teaching.” This course is designed to provide language-teaching majors with key linguistic foundation in phonetics and phonology to be able to analyze the linguistic source of pronunciation errors accurately and provide students with clear explanations and effective, individualized coaching. For non-native speakers of the language they will be teaching, the course is designed as well to strengthen their own pronunciation. A major component of the course will be hands-on working with L2 speakers, chosen …

Teaching To The Teachers: Secondary Education English Students In The Introductory Linguistics Course, Julie S. Amberg, Deborah J. Vause

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

Non-linguistic majors can benefit from well-designed lessons in the introductory linguistics course that raise issues students will need to know about in their future careers. At our institution, the introductory linguistics course is populated by students majoring in English Literary Studies, Secondary Education English, and Professional Writing. Secondary Education English (SEE) majors take Language and Linguistics because they must fulfill requirements mandated by the state: knowledge of morphology, phonology, syntax, history of the English language, and so on. In addition to these required subjects, we introduce other issues as well that we feel are essential to developing these particular students’ …

Linguistics And Tesol At Suny Oswego, Jean Ann, Bruce Long Peng

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

We are linguists with tenure homes in a School of Education (SOE). We were charged with (i) reviving a languishing undergraduate Linguistics major, and (ii) creating a new TESOL Program for undergraduate students destined for NYS certification to teach English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) in K-12 settings. We argued for a subset of courses in the linguistics major to serve as the arts and sciences concentration for the TESOL major. We advise and teach both the TESOL and Linguistics majors. Our teaching loads are about half in the School of Education (SOE) and half in the College of …

Language In Human Life: A Ge Course Targeting English Language Learners, Gail Shuck

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

The presenter will describe a cross-cultural course, Language in Human Life, designed to meet several university needs: 1) To provide a course for non-majors that fulfills a long-standing gap in general education courses at the presenter’s institution that introduce students to linguistic thought, 2) to be a magnet course for speakers of English as an additional language in order to allow all students to learn about each others’ languages, and 3) to offer a linguistically accessible course for lower-proficiency users of English that is taught by an instructor with ESL expertise but that fulfills a university requirement for all students. …

Transitioning From Serving Others’ Students To Serving Our Own, Julie Roberts

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

The current study focuses on a linguistics program in the unusual situation of having emerged from another department. Therefore, the program began by creating classes that would be of interest and relevance to other fields, and, only after the formation of the stand-alone major (2008) and minor (2006), began to fill in with classes that are important to linguists but less “marketable” outside that program. The presentation will focus on the following strategies for maintaining and expanding our relevance to other majors and to the university as a whole and the success and challenges of each:

1. Use of cases/examples …

Weaving Linguistics Into A Range Of Fabrics, Sharon Klein

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

No linguist is ever at a loss to understand how attention to any aspect of language as an object of inquiry can contribute to the context where the piece might be found. But linguists rarely get consulted, because what is also true is that virtually no one beyond the landscape of linguistic study is likely even to know that such a perspective on language exists, much less that it might truly be useful. Waiting for this state of affairs to change is fruitless—surely frustrating—and many of us choose to ignore the views “out there” keeping our individual and collective focus …

Language And The Law, Tineke Scholten

Taking Linguistics Beyond Linguistics Programs and Departments Symposium

This is an upper division course that has been certified as a General Education Course in the area of “Lifelong Learning”. The course also is part of a “Social Justice” GE Path, which encourages students to select their GE courses around a particular theme. The course draws students from a variety of undergraduate majors, including Psychology, Business Law, Political Science, History and Sociology.

The course investigates the role that language and linguistics play in the legal written and oral discourse. In doing so, it hopes to serve two purposes: (1) to illustrate and explicate essential qualities of natural languages and …