Abstract 1C

Saturday, July 8 2:05pm

Socialmedia in the linguistic classroom: discussing appreciation vs appropriation

Lauren Casillas lcasillas19@toromail.csudh.edu
Monique Mangum mmangum1@toromail.csudh.edu
Iara Mantenuto imantenuto@csudh.edu

California State University Dominguez Hills, Carson, USA

Aim. In this talk we address the issue of linguistic justice in teaching linguistics to high school students, in a program serving students who are mostly from the Global Majority and children of immigrants. In particular, inspired by Garza’s (2021) work on appropriation in music videos, we use the discussion of appreciation versus appropriation as the leading topic for a module of a linguistics course, thus centering a topic of high importance for students and their lived experience. An integral part of this module is the use of social media and pop-culture, following Calhoun et al’s (2021) proposal of integrating social media to center sociocultural influences on language practice. 

Student learning goals. Students are asked to recognize the distinction between appropriation and appreciation, and then to examine how blurred the lines between them are, specifically focusing on Black English and Chicanx English. Students are encouraged to reflect on the linguistic features that are appropriate/appreciated, and how these features were used to express specific results, and who benefited from those results. 

Teaching strategy. We propose a major change in the way social media is used in the classroom, not to offer examples, but to introduce the content; each point presented in the course was sustained by either a TikTok video, a YouTube video or a Tweet. The advantage of this use of social media is the contemporaneity of the content, which is highly relatable to the students, the multimediality of it, and the low cost. Students can easily look for resources of this kind to use in their assignments, due to the accessibility of its content – students have familiarity with the medium and can easily retrieve examples to support and answer a question about a topic.

We will set up this presentation to mimic the use of social media in the classroom.

References:

Calhoun, K., Hudley, A. H. C., Bucholtz, M., Exford, J., & Johnson, B. (2021). Attracting Black students to linguistics through a Black-centered Introduction to Linguistics course. Language, 97(1), e12-e38.

Garza, J. Y. (2021). ‘Where all my bad girls at?’: cosmopolitan femininity through racialised appropriations in K-pop. Gender and Language, 15(1), 11-41.