Position Statement on GenerativeAI in teaching and research
The Linguistics Discipline in the Department of Languages and Cultures at La Trobe University have developed a discipline-specific position statement on the role of generative AI in our classrooms. This statement was written to clearly communicate to our students our expectations of them and what they can expect from us.
Linguistic subjects at La Trobe take a consistent approach to AI (particularly Generative AI and LLMs) for learning and teaching. Staff will generally limit their use of generative AI in teaching and research, and clearly communicate if such tools are used. We also encourage students to limit their use of AI for the sake of their own educational experience. Some limited use by students will be supported in specific circumstances. In all instances our use of AI in teaching and research is framed around critical evaluation of the utility of these technologies, as well as the cost and benefit of their use. For more information about this approach, including where Generative AI will be used in teaching and learning see the full statement.
If you find this statement useful, please make use of it with your own students (and let us know how that goes!)
Most
of my teaching in 2020 and 2021 was done online. Like many people, I
had to learn how to teach a lot of my face-to-face classes in online
contexts. My institution used Zoom for this, and even in 2022 and beyond I will continue to teach some classes online. I think this is great. So many of my students used to have a horrific commute just to attend a single class, or
would miss classes because of unavoidable commitments. Of course, there
are many ways studying online is a terrible experience too. One particularly fraught online experience is classroom discussion. An experienced teacher can manage a classroom full of group discussions pretty effectively by moving around the room and keeping an eye and an ear on each group. Students usually
feel sufficiently private at tables, but also have the buzz of the
classroom to help the discussion along. Online classes take all of that
away from everyone.
Over the last two years I’ve developed a way of managing breakout room that makes the best of a bad situation. My students regularly tell me my classes are some of the best they’ve done online, and when I share this method with colleagues they tell me they’re going to borrow it – so I thought I would write it up in case you are also still managing group work in online tutorials and workshops.
Step 1: Set the context
I
don’t make my students have cameras on (you’re making a lot of
assumptions about people’s access to technology and privacy for online
study), but I explain to them the benefits of seeing colleagues faces. I
also encourage students to use the chat box and to play around with the
reaction button to help me calibrate to the mood of
the room. If you get good at running an online classroom with multiple
streams like this, you know some of the multitasking joy of doing live
broadcast radio! But I l also get this isn’t for everyone.
Step 2: Giving students control
I let people select their own breakout group, which is an option in Zoom. I then explain how
they should sort themselves out. The number of rooms I set up and how I
assign them vary depending on the size of the class, but let’s say I
have a group of 20 to keep numbers manageable. I set up 5 breakout rooms
and tell students the following:
The final room is the quiet room: no one speaks, you just work through the activities in a companionable silence.
Rooms 3 and 4 are for groups of friends to move into. Start messaging them now to arrange to work together!
Rooms 1 and 2 are for people who want to meet new people or chat with a random group of people in the subject. Start with room 1 and when there are four people in there start room 2.
I work backwards to flag that I’m committed to supporting the most exhausted students and it’s not an afterthought, but also I like the last room being like the quiet space up the back of the library.
For people in rooms 1-4 the maximum is 4 people. Four
is a good number for conversation – more than that and the conversation
starts to fragment into smaller groups, which is hard to hold together
in an online space.
Step 3: Running rooms
Online
classes need much tighter guidelines and expectations than face-to-face
classes, since it’s harder to change the flow of things. I make sure
tasks are very clear and the time they’ll be in the rooms is also very
clear to them. I also tell students I expect them to spend the first 2-3
minutes at least on small talk (not in the silent room!), online classes can really miss that human connection sometimes.
Sometimes
we have to do a bit of on-the-fly juggling, if two groups vie for the
same breakout room or there are more people in the quiet room than usual
– but often students get the hang of this after a few weeks and get
good at managing the breakout rooms themselves.
I
also let students know that after 10 minutes I’ll come to each room to
answer questions and check in, or they can ping me or return to the
central room to ask questions too. Sometimes I’ll use something like
Google Docs or Slides where I can see students adding content in real
time, which gives me an idea of who might need more help or encouragement.
Why this set up?
This setup for breakout rooms gives students a little more control over their learning experience.
Some students are tired or find online classes incredibly stressful. I like providing them the chance to just get through the material, with a bit of solidarity and a central place I can check in with them.
Some students really miss the chance to sit at a table with their friends and catch up. I know I do!
Some
students miss the chance to get to know new people at university. Some
of the friends I made in undergraduate tutorials are still some of my
closest friends today, I like to give my students some small chance of having that experience too.
The important thing I’ve noticed is: it’s not the same students in the same rooms each time. Some
weeks even the most sociable students need a break, or sometimes your
friends didn’t make it that week and you’re up for meeting someone new.
This is my default for running breakout rooms, but I do shake things up occasionally. I’ll randomly allocate students to breakout rooms for some tasks, telling them I’m intentionally shaking things up and giving them some icebreaker tasks. I usually only make groups of 3 in these weeks to give them more time to get to know each other.
Managing breakout rooms is one of those times where thinking like a has helped me improve my teaching. Thinking about breakout rooms as interactional spaces, and how we generally prefer to interact has helped me refine my classroom management.
If you have any success using–or refining(!)–this process, please let me know!
Crash Course linguistics was written to be accessible to anyone who wants an overview of core topics in linguistics. The series can also be used by teachers to support the teaching of introductory topics. If you’re teaching a 101 level subject you’ll be able to link the videos to relevant weeks by their titles. Below I’ve matched the Crash Course Syllabus to the VCE English Language Units of study for high school teachers in Victoria who would like to include these videos in their curriculum. I have also included links to the relevant Mutual Intelligibility newsletter post, for even more resources to help you learn or teach VCE EL in 2021. You can see all of the Mutual Intelligibility posts here.
(For those outside of Victoria, Australia: the Victorian Certificate of Education includes a subject called English Language, where students learn linguistic concepts to apply to the analysis of English)
Mutual Intelligibility has been a year-long
project to curate online linguistics resources. As teaching and learning
shifted rapidly to internet-based mediums in early 2020, we wanted to
help guide instructors and learners through some of the amazing
linguistics content that’s already freely available online.
Below
is a full collection of all of the posts that featured on Mutual
Intelligibility. Our thanks to everyone who created the resources that
we featured, to Liz McCullough for her editorial work, and to the Lingthusiasm patrons who helped us fund this project.
We
currently do not have plans to continue with regular Mutual
Intelligibility newsletters, but we will keep these existing posts
publically available and you can keep an eye out for the occasional
future email as we have relevant plans to share. For a more regular
correspondence, you can get a monthly email when there’s a new
Lingthusiasm episode (including supplementary links on that topic), by
signing up at lingthusiasm.substack.com.
Crash Course
To accompany the 16 weeks of 10-12 minute introductory videos on Crash Course Linguistics,
we created a newsletter with supporting resources and related
activity/activities, curated by Liz McCullough. The activities are
mostly from the International Linguistics Olympiad and various national olympiads, which are a huge treasure trove of linguistics puzzle sets.
These
six Resource Guides provide a comprehensive lesson plan (like a
textbook’s supplementary material but entirely online), and were
compiled with the assistance of Kate Whitcomb. They are also available
in PDF and Doc format.
3
Links posts are quick highlights lists of three relevant links about a
specific topic, with a short description for each of the three
resources. We produced twenty-three 3 Links posts in 2020, most of which
were edited by Liz McCullough, with other contributors noted on the
posts themselves.
Thanks
to everyone who has been following us and sending in questions and
links over the past year. It’s been our privilege to help make a rough
year somewhat easier for you.
Lauren, Gretchen, Liz, and the rest of the Mutual Intelligibility team
About Mutual Intelligibility
Mutual
Intelligibility is a project to connect linguistics instructors with
online resources, especially as so much teaching is shifting quickly
online due to current events. It’s produced by Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch, with the support of our patrons on Lingthusiasm. Our editor is Liz McCullough.
Mutual
Intelligibility posts will always remain available free, but if you
have a stable income and find that they’re reducing your stress and
saving you time, we’re able to fund these because of the Lingthusiasm Patreon and your contributions there.
If you have other comments, suggestions, or ideas of ways to help, please email mutual.intellig@gmail.com.
Dr. Sarah Brandt is an Associate at The Children’s Center for Communication/Beverly School for the Deaf. CCCBSD is a school north of Boston, MA, serving deaf and hearing
children from birth-age 22 who have developmental and communication
challenges. Within this organisation Sarah works across both The Institute, and The Clinic, I’ll let her explain what programs these two centres deliver. You can follow Sarah on Twitter (@TechBrandt).
What did you study at university?
I studied both linguistics and American Sign Language (ASL) as an undergraduate at the University of Rochester (New York). Rochester is a wonderful place to learn ASL as a second language, due to the strong Deaf community there. Additionally, UR’s linguistics and ASL departments worked closely together and helped me develop both an understanding (and deep appreciation) for the structure and study of languages, but also how that science plays out in signed languages. In addition to studying ASL linguistics, I worked with Dr. Joyce McDonough on Diné bizaad (the Navajo language). I participated in field work in New Mexico with native speakers, which was a very enriching experience!
Following my graduation, I pursued a Masters in Deaf Education at the University of Arizona. It was definitely a shift from a more theoretical lens of language studies to - quite literally - “hands on” work with d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students! But I also gained an appreciation for the academic study of teaching and learning in special populations.
During my work at CCCBSD, I developed a passion for educational technology - assistive tech, learning technologies, and in particular educational media. I remember using an old Mac laptop (these were the pre-tablet days!) with students to make ASL versions of wordless books, and something just clicked - there is SO MUCH promise in the use of educational media for DHH students! I headed back as a student (once again!) to pursue a doctorate in Educational Technology from the University of Florida, which I completed in 2017.
What is your job?
I’ve been working at CCCBSD since 2006, first as a classroom teacher and then as a Media Specialist and Deaf Education Specialist. My role changed in 2019 as I helped establish two new sub organizations at CCCBSD. The Institute serves as a bridge between research and practice, seeking to both curate and create high-quality scholarship that advances outcomes for this population. The Clinic offers specialty services such as evaluations/assessments, therapy, and training to the wider community, all provided with maximum accessibility. We are hard at work to grow these two organizations!
Does your linguistics training help you in your job?
Yes, absolutely! Particularly when it comes to considering both typical and atypical language development, my “linguistics brain” helps me think systematically and analyze things deeply. While (sadly) I’m not spending my days making tree diagrams anymore, my linguistics degree was enormously beneficial in laying the foundation for a mindset and passion for academic learning.
Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
I have to admit I had never even heard of linguistics until I signed up for my first class. In that class at UR, Joyce McDonough said, “Linguistics is a pretty small field. Probably because we all end up a little crazy,” and I thought to myself I HAVE FOUND MY PEOPLE! I knew early on that continuing on a strictly academic path was not going to be right for me, so more knowledge about how a linguistics degree can help those outside of academics would definitely have been helpful! You can do lots of things with linguistics - just look at the list of interviews on this site!
Any other thoughts or comments?
Just a general shout-out regarding accessibility, particularly as 2020 is providing both the challenge and tools to connect across geographic regions. Make sure your content is accessible! Provide captioning, image descriptions, ASL interpreting, etc. There are so many voices and stories that are missing, mis-, or underrepresented in academia and other circles. Make the efforts to draw in new audiences by making your content accessible!
One of the most challenging but most rewarding things about writing the scripts for Crash Course Linguistics was honing content that I’d usually give in a 60 minute lecture down to only 10 minutes. That meant that Gretchen and I really considered everything we included in the course from first principles, including what terminology made the grade.
For episode 09 on the phonetics of vowels, we realised that we had both been using high/low and open/close interchangeably to describe vowels. We talk more about the vowel space in that video, or in episode 17 of Lingthusiasm, but here’s a short summary of how vowels work: We describe vowels along two dimension regarding where the tongue is in the mouth. We also pay attention to whether the lips are rounded or not, nasalisation etc, but in in terms of the mouth we’re interested in two dimensions, pretty much an x-axis and a y-axis. The y-axis is pretty straight-forward, in that people talk about the tongue being front (like the vowels in pit and pet) or back (like the vowels in pot and put).
When it comes to the x-axis, we can talk about whether the tongue is high in the mouth (pit and put) or low in the mouth (pat and pot), but we can also talk about whether the jaw is more open (pat and pot) or close (pit and put). Note that is adjectival ‘close’ with an /s/, not the verb ‘close’ with a /z/. ‘High and ‘close’ mean the same thing, and ‘low’/’open’ mean the same thing, but focus on different anatomical elements. I’ve used these terms interchangably throughout my linguistics teaching and research but Crash Course was a great chance to reflect on why, and if there was a preference for one over the other. Sometimes there are deep-set theoretical motivations for one over the other, other times specialists use one set of terminology and generalists use another because it’s slightly outdated. I wasn’t sure if any of these reasons held in this case, so I set up a very informal twitter survey to quiz people about their preferences.
[Text in image: Linguist mini-survey! Every time I teach vowels I never know which terminology pair to preference. What do you use? My only hypothesis is that phonetics/phonology people might have more consistent terminology, but I’m open (lol) to other thoughts! close/open, work in phon 10.3% high/low, work in phon 21.7% close/open, non-phon 27.8% high/low, non-phon 40.1% 755 votes]
The final result indicates that around twice as many phon people use high/low rather than open/close, and there’s a similar but slightly weaker ratio for non-phon people.
There were arguments made for and against each set of terminology. Some people found ‘close’ and ‘open’ were easier to demonstrate because it’s easier to show the jaw than the tongue. Other people felt that ‘close’ was an unnatural feeling lexical item for them, while a couple of people reported that ‘open/close’ sounded more old-fashioned. Some people preferred to not use ‘high’ and ‘low’ because these are also descriptors of formants, tones and prosody, which could make things confusing. Some people used particular terminology simply to replicate what was in their preferred textbook.
And, of course, I only looked at this terminology in English. People replied in the thread that ‘open/close’ was more common in German, Finnish and Spanish.
The strongest consensus we had was that people made sure students were introduced to both sets of terms. In the end we went with ‘high’ and ‘low’, while also mentioning in passing the physiological features of ‘open’ and ‘close’ so that everyone could find the video useful.
More generally, it’s been interesting to interrogate the terminology that we use, and the fact that there is such relaxed consensus on the lack of consensus regarding this core descriptive feature of spoken languages.
Alongside the 6 Resource Guides, Mutual Intelligibility continues to publish weekly 3 Links posts, bringing you the best linguistics resources on the internet for your classes, or self-directed study.
Below is a list of 3 Links posts published to date. You can sign up to receive weekly emails whenever a new 3 Links post is published.
Mutual Intelligibility is a project to connect linguistics
instructors with online resources, especially as so much teaching is
shifting quickly online due to current events. It’s produced by Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch, with the support of our patrons on Lingthusiasm.
Here’s where you can send us links
(of either things you’ve made or have found useful) for potential
inclusion in future newsletters. You can send a single link, or a set of
three which may become a 3 Links guest-post! (With credit to you.)
Mutual Intelligibility has created 6 resource guides for major topics in linguistics. These guides include the best online resources for each topic, with notes on their content, accessibility and use.
Each of these guides has a link to online PDF and Google Docs versions. We’ve given them Creative Commons licenses, so you can share them directly with students and colleagues.
We teamed up with Kate Whitcomb (Layman’s Linguist) for these guides. Mutual Intelligibility will continue with weekly 3 Links posts, bringing you the best linguistics resources on the internet for your classes, or self-directed study.
The International Phonetic Alphabet is sort of like the Periodic
Table of the Elements for linguistics, or at least for phonetics — when
we’re talking about spoken languages, it’s useful to be able to convey
precisely and unambiguously in writing exactly which sounds we’re
talking about, even when people may have different accents, dialects, or
pet spelling conventions.
Today’s newsletter is our second Resource Guide, and it’s for
teaching the vowels of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a
classic intro linguistics course topic, with a few resources for working
with the IPA in general. This guide is a companion to Introduction to IPA Consonants (Resource Guide 1). Vowels in particular require particular attention because they are more of gradient than categorical phenomena.
Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. Studying
morphology can help us understand how different languages create new
words and modify existing words.
There are many ways to approach the details of what kind of basic
sentence structure to teach intro students to draw, so it would be
impossible to put together a resource on tree-drawing that would satisfy
everyone, but what these disparate approaches have in common is that
they all come back to constituency.
World Englishes is a common topic for beginner classes. It’s a way of
connecting linguistics to students’ experience with the English
language, and to expand their perspectives on how different regions and
populations speak English.
The best way to appreciate linguistics is to understand the diverse
range of the world’s languages and the people who speak them. These
resources can be used to enrich a variety of subjects.
Mutual Intelligibility is a project to connect linguistics
instructors with online resources, especially as so much teaching is
shifting quickly online due to current events. It’s produced by Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch, with the support of our patrons on Lingthusiasm.
Here’s where you can send us links
(of either things you’ve made or have found useful) for potential
inclusion in future newsletters. You can send a single link, or a set of
three which may become a 3 Links guest-post! (With credit to you.)
The Lingthusiasm website now has a handy page that lists all of the main episodes of the show by linguistic sub-field. From the page:
Lingthusiasm makes a great addition to your linguistics teaching resources!
Whether
you’re teaching at a university, high school, online course, or other
institution, Lingthusiasm is a fun way to introduce foundational
concepts in linguistics, provide background or further enrichment, or
give 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.
Below are our main episodes, by topic. Note that some episodes cover multiple topics! We also have bonus episodes available on our Patreon page, where you can also commission episodes on topics relevant to your course.
If
you use Lingthusiasm in your teaching, we’d love to hear from you!
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.
Here are all the episodes by topic, up to episode 18:
OK, here’s the boring real talk - the majority of people who do a PhD don’t find jobs in academia (these numbers from a 2013 Atlantic article seem rather optimistic to me). A large number of my colleagues and friends from linguistics have found jobs at universities that are sometimes called ‘alt(ernative) academic’ - working as administrators, research officers, and in student support. I wanted to interview one of them about the experience, and Olga Maxwell kindly agreed.
Olga is an amazing phonetician, she’s worked on prosody and intonation, with a focus on the relationship between first and second languages. As you’ll see below, she manages to juggle a role teaching professional skills to academics, and a consultancy where she directly applies her research to helping improve communication in medical interactions. You can keep in touch with Olga’s work via Academia.edu and LinkedIn.
What did you study at university?
I completed my
undergraduate studies in Ukraine. My 5-year Bachelor Degree with Honors was in
Linguistics & Philology, Teaching English Language and Literature. The
degree included a number of Linguistic, Applied Linguistic and Education subjects, including Phonetics, Semantics, Stylistics, History of the English Language,
Grammar of English, Syntax, Morphology, Discourse Analysis, Teaching
Methodologies, and Program Evaluation.
In addition to a
number of purely Linguistic subjects, I also studied Philosophy, Latin, World
Literature (over 3 years) and the Spanish language. I find these subject gave
some personal growth and overall enrichment, but have had no practical
application.
Back in Ukraine, I
was teaching English as a foreign language to children and adults as well
lectured and tutored a number of Linguistic subjects. When I came to Australia
in 1999, I was not sure what I could do with my educational background. For a
while, I worked at AMES Australia teaching English to migrants as well teaching
Academic English.
I have always
enjoyed teaching English and teaching in general. However, it was not enough
for me. This is when I decided to enroll in Masters in Applied Linguistics
(TESOL) and did a thesis in Experimental Phonetics. As the next step, I did a
PhD in Linguistics in Applied Linguistics, with a thesis topic related to
Laboratory Phonology, Phonetics, Second Language Acquisition and World Englishes.
What is your job?
My current job is
slightly different to what I expected to be doing at this stage of my career. My
position is classified as a lecturer, but does not involve teaching discipline
specific subjects. I provide professional development for academic staff and
assist with various aspects of learning and teaching. For example, curriculum design,
blended and online learning and teaching, curriculum evaluation and
development, developing affective assessments, and digital literacies. I get to
do workshops, one-on-one professional development sessions, and seminars. I had
a similar job before I started my PhD research.
Besides my main job,
I also work as a linguistic consultant. This is something that is much closer
to what I have studied at university and researched. For over 8 years, I have been working with international medical
graduates, various professions. I have developed and delivered workshops and programs across
Victoria and Queensland, in collaboration with senior consultants and
educators. Since 2014, I have been involved in the design and delivery of a
course for the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry, funded
by the Australian Government. Some of the aspects that I have taught over the
years include language and communication skills, clinical interview
skills, communication of empathy, skills to explain and negotiate, and
cross-cultural clinical communication.
How does your linguistics training help you
in your job?
In terms of my main job, I am not
sure my linguistic background contributes to a large degree. Perhaps, when it
comes to developing assessments, creating marking rubrics, and evaluating
programs (Applied Linguistics). In my BA degree, I also had a prominent
educational focus. This is probably helping me much more in my current job.
Linguistic knowledge and skills, however,
have definitely contributed to my development as a consultant. Given my strong
interest in World Englishes, second language acquisition and spoken language, I
was able to develop programs, workshops and resources tailored to various first
language backgrounds and varieties of English. My research experience gave me a
better understanding of and appreciation for the subtle differences in the use
of English language in day to day conversation and in the clinical
environment.
Do you have any advice do you wish someone
had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
In my undergraduate
degree, I was always told that I would become an English language teacher.
While during my MA and PhD years, the only career path I could see (perhaps the
result of the environment) was academia. It would have been great, if I had some
advice on other possible pathways, where I could do more applied linguistic
work. I am most likely unaware of all the possible options.
Any other thoughts or comments?
It would be
interesting to find out how career choices are made. For example, in may case, I
love Linguistics and I would like to stay in academia, but there aren’t that
many jobs locally. I am not willing to move to another country due to family
reasons. Hence, I need to find alternative ways of developing my career while
still remaining in the academia/university environment.
Mark Liberman is one of the most prolific and enduring linguistics bloggers, thanks to Language Log, but this is not the only place you can read Mark’s thoughts about linguistics online. He also has his course notes for Ling001, his Intro to Linguistics course at The University of Pennsylvania online as well:
This includes lecture notes full of links and examples. Here’s how lecture 12 on Semantics starts:
You will sometimes see definitions for semantics like “the analysis of meaning,” To see why this is too broad, consider the following.
Kim, returning home after a long day, discovers that the new puppy has crapped on the rug, and says “Oh, lovely.”
We don’t normally take this to mean that Kim believes that dog feces has pleasing or attractive qualities, or is delightful. Someone who doesn’t know English will search the dictionary in vain for what Kim means by saying “lovely”:
(ADJECTIVE): [love-li-er, love-li-est].
1. Full of love; loving.
2. Inspiring love or affection.
3. Having pleasing or attractive qualities.
4. Enjoyable; delightful.
Obviously this is because Kim is being ironic, in the sense of “using words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning”. Kim might have said “great,” or “wonderful,” or “beautiful”,
or “how exquisite”, and none of the dictionary entries for these words will help us understand that Kim means to express disgust and annoyance.
That’s because a word’s meaning is one thing, and Kim’s meaning – what Kim means by using the word – is something else.
You may find this a better pace than the Virtual Linguistics Campus MOOC I posted about a couple of weeks ago, especially if you’re just after a refresher, or new and amusing examples.
I’ve been wanting to interview an English language teacher for this series since I started it. I spent some time teaching English before I started my undergraduate degree, and I know that I would have benefited from many of the skills I learnt in my linguistics major. I met Ash when he was doing his Honours year. I knew that he had gone to Japan to teach English, and he very kindly agreed to be interviewed. Turns out he’s been busy since then!
What did you study at university?
I
did a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Science double degree, with majors
in Geology, Japanese and Linguistics. As it happens, linguistics was the
major I enjoyed most and pursued for the longest.
In
linguistics, I did a wide range of subjects, but those I found most
interesting were about grammar (syntax and morphology). In my Honours
year I wrote a thesis on the grammar of an Australian language called
Marri Ngarr.
I have since also completed a Masters in
TESOL, in which my linguistics background not only helped me get lots
of credit for prior learning, but also simplified much of the learning
for me
What is your job?
After
graduating I worked as an English teacher in a Japanese junior high school,
primary school, kindergarten and local town adult evening class.
Day-to-day I assisted a main Japanese teacher at the junior high school
to make her classes more communicative and overall more interesting for
the students. At the primary school and kinder I ran the classes myself,
combining insights from both my linguistics major and masters degree
(that I was doing simultaneously) to try to make truly effective and
innovative lessons. Although phonetics had never been my main interest
during my uni days, it was especially useful in teaching Japanese
children how to pronounce English sounds.
These days I
am not working full time, but have become a language student myself in
Korea. Learning Korean has definitely been made easier by my knowledge
of Japanese and by my knowledge of linguistics, in particular how people
learn languages best, and just in grasping grammatical and semantic
nuances faster than some of my classmates.
At the same
time, I still do some English teaching in the form of private tutoring.
Again, my linguistic knowledge helps in every single lesson, whether
I’m explaining how someone should position their mouth to pronounce a
tricky sound, explaining an English grammar point, advising on how best
to improve/study, or just generally in my selection of activities for
the tutoring session.
Do you gave any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
Study
linguistics! If you have even a small amount of interest in language,
linguistics will enable you to understand it in deeper ways than you can
even imagine before linguistics training. And if you are considering a
career as a language teacher, linguistics will make you a far better
teacher.
Also, don’t do a language major in
university: A year in a language school (or even self-study) in the
country where it is spoken is worth more than any amount of study of
that language in an Australian university. This is particularly true if you have some
linguistics training to help you along.
First week of lessons on sentences in Modern Tibetan:
འདི་ཉ་ཡིན་
‘di nya yin
this is a fish
First week of lessons on sentences in Classical Tibetan:
སངས་རྒྱས་ཀྲི་སྤྲུལ་སྐྲུའི་བསྟན་པ་ཟབ་མོ་ཡིན་
sans rgyas kyi sprul skru’i bstan pa zab mo yin
The reincarnate Buddha’s teachings are profound
Last term I sat in on two Tibetan classes at SOAS. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit that even though I’ve spent the last 6 years working with languages closely related to Tibetan, I’d never learned how to read the Ucen script (the communities I work with live in Nepal, and are more familiar with Devanagari).
Learning to read the Tibetic scrip, and having an introduction to Modern and Classical Tibetan was awesome. Tibetan has a long written tradition and a collection of silent letters and spelling rules (e.g. sprul skru is pronounced tul ku), so working through those in a class was great. I loved Classical Tibetan, especially because our classes involved the kind of culturally relevant amusing sentences like the one above.
In this installment of ‘linguistics jobs’ we chat with Jason, who is a high school teacher in Australia. Jason did undergrad at Monash University with other linguist friends of mine, including Rosey (whose linguistics baking has feature on Superlinguo before). Jason teaches junior and middle level classes, as well as VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education), which is the final 2 years of secondary schooling in Victoria, Australia. VCE has an awesome subject called ‘English Language’, which is basically a Linguistics of English subject.
What did you
study at university?
I first enrolled in a bachelor of Arts/Law but quickly transferred into pure Arts, taking a
major in linguistics and a minor in classical studies. At some point something
clicked in my head and I decided I wanted to learn as much as I could about
languages so I thought I’d start with ancient languages. I used to scour the
library for books about Sanskrit and things like that, and make up my own
scripts and languages during lectures when I probably should have been
listening. I already had French and learning Latin made so many things switch
on in my brain. I can only describe it as an enlightening experience. The
linguistics I studied included the introductory subjects, semantics, the
structure, history and sociolinguistics of English (all with Kate Burridge),
Aboriginal languages, phonetics and phonology, language endangerment and
documentation (with Simon Musgrave) and a subject on Eastern Austronesian
languages.
After my
degree I completed a further 2 years of undergraduate study to gain a major in
French and a minor in English Lit, due to my desire to become a teacher and
have the necessary prerequisites. Then I did a one-year Graduate Diploma of Education, also at Monash, specialising in French and
English methods.
What
is your job?
I’m a secondary school teacher in an all-girls government school. I
teach VCE mainly, in French and English Language. Day to day I plan my classes,
deliver my lessons, develop course materials, consult with colleagues about the
directions to take with certain things, and grade work of course.
How
does your linguistics training help you in your job?
My linguistics training has been crucial. English Language draws on a lot
of my linguistics study, and also keeps me in touch with how people think and
write about language. It allows me to bring these ideas to young people,
something really special considering when I left high school I had no notion of
what linguistics was other than knowing languages and maybe writing grammar
books on them. Not only this, but it has given me a very tolerant and
descriptive approach to language generally which helps me lead in-class
discussions and educate future generations about the complexity and diversity
of language (especially through the subjects I happen to teach!). In French it
also has equipped me with some interesting methods of teaching an inflecting
language that has a long tradition of being taught in certain ways.
Do you
have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
I suppose I
wish I had realised what it was before I stumbled upon it. Linguistics
has always had a hard time being recognised by the wider community as something
separate to language learning, interpretation & translation, etc. I wish
that people like you guys had been around 10-15 years ago to educate kids that
there are careers you can do in studying language itself!
Any
other thoughts or comments?
I think that I
personally shied away from pursuing linguistics as an academic career, but there is a
strong part of me that wants to go out to “save the languages”. I’m happy to be
helping out by informing young people that there is this “thing called
linguistics” that exists and they should study it.
A recent discussion with my friend Annie, who is a speech pathologist, reminded me of something that I had not given a thought to since I was five. We were talking about the kind of things she does when working with children who have articulation problems (they know the word, but might have trouble with a particular sound). She was talking about repeating words with children, and then while saying the letter ‘p’ she put her hand next to her mouth and made a short opening:
I realised that when I was in my first year of primary school I had learnt a hand sign to correspond to the the sounds as I was learning the alphabet. Annie informed me that it is a language training method known as cued articulation (or cued speech). Each sound corresponds to a hand sign - even after almost 25 years I can still remember a few.
The cool thing now is that I realise the relationship between them that I never noticed before - to make a 'b’ you use the same handshape as 'p’, but with two fingers on the top, because it’s the voiced equivalent. It’s the same for s/z, k/g and f/v if I remember correctly. Unfortunately I can’t find a decent chart on the internet to show them all to you.
Cued articulation is different to sign language finger spelling, but it has been used to help deaf children develop spoken language. I’m not sure it would have been particularly useful for a classroom full of normal development kids, but I remember it was a lot of fun (maybe I’ve always been a language nerd!).
