Lingthusiasm makes a great addition to your linguistics teaching resources!

Whether you’re teaching at a university, high school, middle school, online course, or other institution, Lingthusiasm is a fun way to introduce foundational concepts in linguistics, provide background or further enrichment, or add a linguistic perspective in another discipline, like language learning, literature, language arts, psychology, history, sociology, global studies, English as a second/additional language, computer science, and more. 

Each episode of Lingthusiasm has a full transcript and a show notes page with additional links, which you’re welcome to use to supplement your lesson plan. Main episodes are also swear-free and on topics appropriate for general audiences of all ages. (For bonus episodes, which are behind a paywall at Patreon, we aim to cover less pedagogically-relevant topics and do not make this guarantee - some, for example, are on the linguistics of swearing.) For more teaching resources, see also the #intro linguistics and #high school tags on the blog of one of our hosts. 

Here are some teaching suggestions based on what other instructors have told us about how they’ve used Lingthusiasm in the classroom. 

Pick an episode as supplementary material

Pick an episode yourself on a topic you’re not going to have a chance to cover in as much depth as you wish in your class (perhaps one of our interviews?), or have students choose their own Lingthusiasm episode from the full list on a topic that interests them. Have students listen to or read the transcript of the episode, and then write a short summary of what they found interesting about it or do some further digging (through the shownotes, Wikipedia, Google Scholar, or their local library) to find out more about some aspect of the episode, depending on the level of the students and the depth of the assignment desired. 

Structure the course around episodes

We’ve created a 16-part suggested intro linguistics curriculum, which is especially appropriate for instructors who are looking for textbook-style guidance, people who are self-teaching, or courses that have had their contact hours reduced. Each of the 16 free lesson plans contains a 10-12 minute video from Crash Course Linguistics (which we were writers for), a Lingthusiasm episode expanding on the topic, a few relevant links from elsewhere online, and a relevant exercise or two with answer key, mostly from the linguistics olympiads (all free resources online). 

Pick and choose relevant episodes 

If you’d like to DIY your selection of Lingthusiasm episodes and how they might fit into your syllabus, here’s a list of our main episodes organized by topic. Note that some episodes cover multiple topics!  

If you use Lingthusiasm in your teaching, we’d love to hear from you! We’re especially keen on ideas you’ve tried that we haven’t mentioned here, but all kinds of comments are very useful and interesting to us! We’re keeping stats on how Lingthusiasm is used in coursework, so it would be a great help to us if you could fill in this brief survey.