Saturday, July 8 4:15pm
Word Journals: using active, co-constructive assignments to broaden general-interest linguistics
Lingzi Zhuang lingzi.zhuang@utoronto.c
University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada
Argument. Within a general-interest linguistics course, assignment designs that embody broadly constructivist principles of active knowledge (co-)construction and prior experience incorporation [1], [2] can facilitate more equitable and individualized knowledge-building trajectories, while broadening the conventional focus on linguistic theory training. I illustrate this with a novel assignment design—“Word Journals.”
Defining the question. Linguistics courses are typically oriented towards the transmission of specialized theoretical knowledge. However, a great many students take introductory-level linguistics for breadth, bringing various prior experience levels and aspirations with human languages to the classroom. How can a general-interest linguistics course recognize, and mobilize, this diversity of individuals and of motivations more directly and productively?
Word journals. In a general-interest course on “English words,” I replace conventional constructed-puzzle problem sets with a Word Journal task. Each week, students actively document three words encountered through their daily or academic life, scaffolded by prompts to look for linguistic concepts/properties learned concurrently in lectures. For each word, students (a) document the context/personal story of the encounter and their prior point of interest in that word, and (b) pursue that interest by performing a mini-research task on the relevant linguistic property of the word, using a well-constrained, but reasonably complex, set of resources (e.g. the Oxford English Dictionary, Google Books Ngram Viewer), summarizing their findings in the Word Journal.
Co-construction. In the weekly “tutorial/recitation” session, students participate in a communal “Word Exchange,” by sharing both the scientific and the personal stories behind their words with peers, eventually collecting two peer entries to be added to their Word Journal.
Assessment equity. Self-documentary writing, such as embodied in Word Journals, provides greater resolution for equitable assessment. I demonstrate one such rubric which balances objective scientific quality benchmarks with individual/subjective exploration and growth.
Selected references
[1] C. Twomey. Fosnot, Constructivism : theory, perspectives, and practice, 2nd ed. New York: Teachers College Press, 2005.
[2] T. L. Good and A. L. Lavigne, Looking in classrooms, Eleventh edition. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Scholarly Teaching in Linguistics 