here - Linguistic Society of America

Friday, 4 JanuaryWorkshoppapers, written in groups of two or three, including at least one linguistics student each, ranged from minimalist analyses of earlybilingual code switching to the extent of UG's involvement in 2nd language acquisition.Patrícia Amaral (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)The Hispanic Linguistics major at UNC Chapel HillThe undergraduate major in Hispanic Linguistics at UNC Chapel Hill started in the Fall of 2011. The number of enrollments hasshown a significant interest in this area. This presentation looks at the challenges of creating a major with a focus on linguisticswithin a department of Romance Languages. I will discuss in particular the contribution of this major to the overallreconfiguration of the department and the courses it offers, as well as the role of the undergraduate program in laying thefoundations for a future graduate program. I will also present some of the issues addressed in course design and implementationand how the architecture of the major intends to foster interest both in Linguistics and in the study of the other languages offeredby the department. Finally, I will talk about some of the current efforts to develop the research component of the major and itsoverall visibility within the university.Stefan Huber (University of South Florida)Teaching the terminologyOne of the major initial obstacles challenging students of foreign languages and linguistics is the acquisition and correct use oflinguistic terminology. This process is by no means trivial: Learning the jargon encompasses learning the fundamental structuralcategorization of a given natural language as well as the basic concepts of linguistic research in general.This paper addresses some general issues with teaching linguistic terminology as experienced in various class settings and thesissupervisions. In particular, the possibilities and limitations of semantically-driven descriptions of grammatical phenomena (e.g.“the dative object is the receiver of a transferred object or the beneficiary of a verbal event”) and syntactic functions (e.g. “thesubject is the entity that actively carries out the verbal event”) will be discussed.For illustrative purposes, data from various native languages such as English, German, and Swedish will be produced.Christopher Sapp (University of Mississippi)The role of linguistics in a small German programThis paper discusses the place of linguistics courses in a small, undergraduate German program. Today's foreign-languageprograms are moving away from traditional content areas and are increasingly focused on proficiency, yet even in thisenvironment, linguistics courses have an important role to play. First, if the courses are taught in the target language andcarefully structured, students are exposed to comprehensible input and can practice speaking and writing. Secondly, students gainmeta-linguistic knowledge that they can use to refine their accuracy in producing the language. My course on German Phoneticsand Phonology introduces students to the sounds of German from a linguistic perspective, trains them in phonetic analysis, andhelps them apply that knowledge to refine their pronunciation. The final project for the course introduces students to researchingand writing a social-science paper, while encouraging them to reflect on their own acquisition of German.Thomas W. Stewart, Jr. (University of Louisville)Let descriptivism speak for itself: on laying the groundwork for more productive accounts of language phenomena inEnglish/Linguistics cross-listed coursesIn teaching cross-listed courses on the English language, linguists often struggle against a tide of unconsciously-acquired (andthus unquestioningly-defended) language myths on the part of their students, which derive from standard language ideology.When a teacher chooses to foreground the catchy, time-honored, and apparently binary distinction between “descriptive” and“prescriptive” grammar, especially on day 1, what is saved in presentation time in class is lost in students’ comprehension andbuy-in. The minor formal contrast between the prefixes in these two words in fact masks a fundamental distinction in methods ofargumentation and standards of evidence. A proportion of students may provisionally submit to a teacher’s “hard sell” of someversion of descriptivism out of a desire to succeed in a particular class, but because this is strategic acquiescence rather thanconviction borne of personal experience, the students’ experiment in descriptivism may well end when the course does.94