Our Youngest Guest Speaker!

For the past few weeks, our Linguistics class has been talking about Language Acquisition.  The timing has worked out perfectly with the AP Psych class focusing on Language as well.  On the day before Winter Break, my son Ben came in to talk to my students so that they could observe for themselves characteristics of speech in a child who is two years, eleven months old.  I told my son that he was coming in to talk to my students about trucks.  I told him that my students didn't know the difference between an excavator and a front end loader:  his response was "Why??"  He also said he might talk to them about baseball, another one of his favorite topics.  I made sure to have plenty of toys available for him to interact with, my mother-in-law read us a story, and the class also presented Ben with a gift of a new truck to thank him for coming in.  The highlight of the hour was when Ben realized that he could get the class to repeat after him.  He would hold up an object and say, "Everybody say 'Eraser!' or 'Blanket!' or 'Truck!'."

Thanks to Zoe for taking pictures!

The students' homework over the break is to spend thirty minutes observing the language of a child between the ages of birth and four years old.  The students can choose to interact with the child themselves or to watch a parent, relative, sibling, or friend interact with the child.  The students will be taking note of the sounds, words, phrases, and/or sentences the child produces.  Each student will write a paper summarizing their experience, and they will share what they learned with the class in an oral presentation.

Fun with Phonetics!

Check out the University of Iowa's website on Phonetics at http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/.  It is an interactive website where you can click on the different sounds of American English, Spanish, and German and see how the sound is produced.  It is a great tool for explaining to students the differences between consonants and vowels and for studying the place and manner of articulation.  I model for my students how the website works and then they use their headphones and laptops to do more exploring.

NACLO

The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013.  Interested students should register at:  http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/reg_student.php 

Last year Milwaukee had the second highest number of students compete in NACLO, coming in after Carnegie Mellon University where the competition began.

I also recommend googling "NACLO Sample Problems" to print out problems from the last few years of competition.  (The answer keys are available, too--phew!)

How To Write a Daily Language Observation

Every day Linguistics students are expected to be keen observers of language, making notes about the interesting things they hear.  From time to time, students need to write up a more formal language observation.  They need to describe the context of the situation where they observed something interesting, they must explain in detail exactly what they heard, they must create a hypothesis about why the interesting thing was said in the way it was, and finally they must figure out a way that they could potentially test or do research to determine if their hypothesis was correct.  Recent topics that students have written about include the use of the words "finna" and "yous," as well as a list of the most recent slang being spoken in New York City from a student who visited recently.

Body Language

My students showed an interest in learning more about the role of body language in communication, so I purchased the Secrets of Body Language DVD (2009) put out by the History Channel.  We started watching it yesterday and over the weekend students are focusing their observations of language on body language. We will finish the documentary on Tuesday and discuss what students observed.  The film started by saying that only seven percent of human communication comes directly from language itself and the other 93 percent comes from tone, pitch, microexpressions, and gestures.

Morpheme Activity

As a way to begin our unit on Morphology, students starting by cutting out ten words from newspapers and magazines.  They then took notes on morphology and morphemes and identified how many morphemes were in each word they cut out.  Below are some examples of the student-made worksheets.

Endangered Languages

 

A language dies every two weeks.  This fact astounds students (and me!).  Endangered Languages are interesting to discuss with anyone, but high school students in particular are a great audience because it may be work they are interested in doing in the future.

Early in the course, I show my students The Linguists documentary film, which features the work of Dr. K. David Harrison and Dr. Greg Anderson as they travel the globe recording languages with very few surviving speakers.

Some of my students and I were fortunate to be invited to a Linguistics Symposium on the topic of Endangered Languages at the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee in October of 2011.  We had the chance to meet Dr. Harrison and listen to his lecture about his research.

Some student linguists, me, and Dr. K. David Harrison

 You can read more about Dr. Harrison's work through the National Geographic website:
http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/enduring-voices/

While we were at the Symposium, we were also able to meet Dr. Daniel Everett, a linguist who has spent his professional life studying the Piraha language spoken in the Amazon River basin.  Some of the students and I had read his book Don't Speak, There Are Snakes, and we were quite excited to meet with Dr. Everett himself.

What I got most out of attending the conference is that my students were recognized as real scholars and everyone in the room was happy to see young people interested in studying language.  They were even introduced during the opening of the symposium as "the youngest linguists in the room."

Pidgin Dinner Party

Imagine that you are in Russia.  You are not fluent in Russian.  But it is the morning, and you are hungry.  There is an orange vendor selling oranges outside of your hotel and you would like to buy one.  The orange vendor speaks no English.  How will you communicate?  You will create a pidgin language!  You will point, you will say the few words of Russian you have picked up since you arrived, you will use English, you will laugh, you will go back and forth with the vendor until both of you agree how many oranges you will be buying and how much it will cost.  Pidgin languages happen when people meet who do not share a common language and yet they need to communicate.  In situations where these people repeatedly meet, this pidgin language becomes more regularized.  Eventually, if the pidgin language becomes widespread with many people using it so that a baby learns it as a native language, it is called a creole.

When we were talking about pidgin languages in our Linguistics class, I had a group of students come up to the front of the room.  All of the students spoke different second languages, and they were only able to speak using their second language for the purpose of the exercise.  The seven students had to figure out how to share a granola bar without using any English.  They had so much fun gesturing, laughing, and trying to get the other students to understand the words they were using that they came up with the idea to experience a pidgin language on a bigger scale.  We decided that we would have a "Pidgin Dinner Party" during class on Friday.  Everyone would bring a dish to pass and dressing formally was encouraged.  We invited teachers who had second hour prep to join us.

For the Dinner Party, students were seated next to people who did not speak the same second language that they did.  In our class we had speakers of French, Spanish, German, Mandarin, Japanese, Hmong, and Igbo (I teach in a language immersion school).  Students had to figure out how to share a meal with each other without using English.

Looking back, many students said that it was their favorite activity in the class!

Do You Speak American?

Do You Speak American?

This website is a fantastic source from PBS.  You will find lesson plans for teachers, surveys to complete, lists of slang to analyze, and speech recordings to listen to.  There are also DVDs available for purchase from the PBS TV series Do You Speak American?

Link to Use While Talking about Accents

21 Accents with Amy Walker

Click on the link above!  Amy Walker introduces herself using 21 different accents.  She also has videos on her website to teach students how to practice speaking with different accents.

Letter for Parents

January 25, 2011

Dear Parents and Guardians of Linguistics Students:

Your child is about to start a very different sort of class.  For the first time in the United States, Linguistics is being offered as a high school elective course.  Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and, up to now, it was a course reserved for study at the college level.  But discussion about language is important, fascinating, and relevant to all people, and so this course seeks to create a classroom of curious students looking to know more about the languages they speak and the languages that others speak, have spoken, and will speak.

In this course, students will be introduced to major subfields within Linguistics:

• Phonetics (the study of the sounds of language)
• Morphology (the study of the parts that make up words)
• Syntax (the study of the rules that govern sentence formation)
• Historical Linguistics (the study of how languages change and evolve over time)
• Sociolinguistics (the study of how language functions in society and works to shape and reflect identity)
• Language Acquisition (the study of how babies acquire first languages and how children and adults acquire second languages)
  
  By the end of this course, students should be able to:
• Identify several myths that people commonly believe about language and explain the facts behind the myths
• Transcribe sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet
• Describe how sounds are produced by the human anatomy
• Break down the number of morphemes in a given word
• Give examples of how English uses root words from Latin and Greek to form a large number of words
• Discuss the various dialects of English spoken in the United States
• Summarize key events that occurred in the history of the English language
• Explain how professional linguists gather data in the field
• Discuss opinions on contemporary language issues by several famous essayists
• Look at a data set from a foreign language and begin to explain grammatical rules that are governing the patterns they see
• Discuss the role of language within different groups in society, looking at how gender, age, class, ethnicity, and region affect speech characteristics

Supplies students need for this class are:

• Binder (2 inches minimum)
• Notebook
• Looseleaf
• Highlighter
• Post-it notes
• Pens and pencils, White-out

In this class, I am looking for students to be mature and intellectually curious.  I expect students to pay careful attention to each other and to me.  I expect students to come to class every day with their materials, homework, and a readiness and enthusiasm to learn.

Students will be reading excerpts from college-level Linguistics textbooks.  Students will be watching video clips and exploring Linguistics-related websites.  Students will be doing class presentations, both formal and informal.  Students will be asked to record their observations about language daily in the back half of their notebooks and will select one of their daily language observations as the topic for a final research project and presentation in the second half of the course.

Grades in this course will be weighted 50% Classwork and Homework and 50% Essays, Projects, and Quizzes.  The final exam for the course will be worth 25% of the semester grade.

I am excited to work with these pioneering high school students in Linguistics this semester!

Sincerely,
Suzanne Loosen
(414) 393-5823
loosensa@milwaukee.k12.wi.us

Research Project on a Language

Students did a research project early in the semester on a particular language. Each group of two picked a language out of a hat (Xhosa, Hungarian, Cherokee, Basque, Icelandic, Gaelic, Tok Pisin, Afrikaans, Croatian etc.) and had to research background information on the language. They used www.ethnologue.com as a starting point for their research.  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. 

Daily Language Observations

A key component of the course was asking students to really pay attention to the language that was used around them every day.  Students kept a notebook of ''Daily Language Observations'' where they recorded things about language that made them think, question, or laugh.  We frequently began class by having several students share an interesting observation that they had made the day before.  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, bilingualism's impact on student GPA, how magazines that target women differ in their use of adjectives from magazines that target men). 

Introduction

In December of 2009, I finished my Master's degree in English with a focus on Language and Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee.  For my final thesis project, I designed a high school level Linguistics course, with the hope of eventually teaching it at Milwaukee School of Languages (where I have taught since 2003).  The course was officially approved by Milwaukee Public Schools in the spring of 2010, and in the spring of 2011, Milwaukee School of Languages became the first high school in the United States to offer an elective course in Linguistics. There were 24 students in the original class, mostly juniors and seniors, with two sophomores. 

I will be teaching Linguistics again this fall at MSL, and I plan to share experiences and materials on this blog for others who are interested in teaching a course on Linguistics at their school as well.

https://segue.middlebury.edu/sites/intd0112a-s07