Abstract 5A

Sunday, July 9 3:00pm

Syntactically Branching out Beyond the Traditional Classroom: A Report on the Discovery Method

Jean Costa-Silva jeancosta@uga.ed
Vera Lee-Schoenfeld vleesch@uga.edu

University of Georgia, Athens, USA

The limitations of traditional teaching styles have been extensively discussed in higher education literature (Lewis and Williams, 1994; Strelan, et al., 2020; Liu and Pásztor, 2022; among many). Often teacher-centered, these styles tend to pay little attention to learners’ needs and the development of critical thinking (Chena and Yang, 2019). Focusing on the learner, the Discovery Method and its subsequent model, Experiential Learning, take learning to be the result of doing as it occurs in the process (Ausubel, 1961; Dewey, 1966; Kolb, 1984).

This talk reports on the successful use of the Discovery Method in a Generative Syntax course. Rather than reading textbooks on syntactic analysis and doing exercises to apply what was read, students interact with problem-sets collaboratively to build their own analyses of syntactic phenomena step by step. Learning happens in a cyclical process guiding students to engage in hypothesizing, experimenting, and building knowledge from trial and error – resembling the work of real-life scientists (Kolb, 1984; Lewis and Williams, 1994; Prince, 2004).

Our pedagogical principle, the Learning Cycle, is illustrated in Figure 1:

Figure 1: The Learning Cycle

The larger cycle represents work that students mostly carry out in class. The smaller cycle consists of stages completed at home. The colors indicate patterns of interaction: (i) red circles represent stages of peer collaboration in which the Instructor plays the role of facilitator; (ii) blue stages are those in which Instructor and Teaching Assistant provide students with explicit instruction; (iii) yellow circles are stages in which students work independently.

In this presentation, we discuss the expectations and outcomes of each stage of our Learning Cycle. We then present sample materials, including homework problem-sets and rubrics. Finally, we show the results of a sentiment analysis of the written feedback provided by students to illustrate our Discovery Method success.