Diversifying the field: Activities to make linguistics more relevant
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i2.5094Keywords:
pedagogy, linguistic teaching, cultural frameworks, first generation, integrated frameworkAbstract
Students find linguistics at times abstract and intimidating and they have a hard time understanding how they can apply what they learn in our classes to the real world and how to relate their cultural/community experiences to it. As a consequence, we inadvertently restrict the pool of linguistic students. Inspired by work done by Charity Hudley et al. (2017), Trester (2017), Chávez & Longerbeam (2016), and by my personal experiences, I created a series of activities for my introduction to linguistics and syntax courses to respond to this problem. I offer some suggestions on how to make our linguistics courses more practical and relatable to our students, in particular first-generation students. The long-term goal is to organically engage and retain a diverse pool of students, thus enriching our field with their perspectives. We can achieve this goal by balancing teaching practices across cultural frameworks.
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Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.