linguistics in the classroom

Trust your students

Tweet As a professor of freshman writing, I teach students who are just out of high school. Some students are satisfied with their former high schools, but most complain bitterly. The most frequent complaint is about sitting around doing nothing, not that the subject matter is too difficult. Why are teachers so afraid to challenge […]

Dictionary Day

Tweet Noah Webster’s birthday is October 16th, now known to a fraction of the population as “Dictionary Day.” It’s a good day to think about words. We have just witnessed the birth of a new word, twerk — a reminder that our vocabulary is ever evolving. IDennis Baron’s always interesting blog The Web of Language tells of a […]

German and English

Tweet German-speaking friends are visiting us. Their vocabularies, cultural knowledge, and structural command of English are impressive, and we speak together fluently. This afternoon we worked on the little bit of accent that remains in my friend’s English speech.  It involves voicing the “g” of “German” or of “joy,” and getting used to pronouncing “th.” […]

Evolving First Names

Tweet Here are the first names of the 18 students in my fall class at Montclair State University: Carolyn, Melina, Pamela, Miguel, Nardeen, Kanequa, Julieth, Leslie, Alaysia, Carla, Milena (two Melinas!), Russell, Charles, Iyana, Kejdi, Aya, Klavdiya, Usman. I suspect that finding out the naming rituals in all of the cultures involved would require a couple of weeks of study; the “Charles,” for example, is a Charles IV. Investigating the meanings of […]

Definitions

Tweet This morning I had a discussion with my five-year-old granddaughter about believing in things. She believes in Jack Frost, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and Rapunzel. I explained why no human could have 14-foot-long hair like Rapunzel, not even the Sikhs who never cut their hair. As for Santa Claus, I told her I […]

Endangered Languages Week

Tweet Did you know this was endangered languages week?  I didn’t, but I’m glad it’s happening.  With all the alarming news that has hogged the headlines over the past few months, endangered languages have sunk to a lower rung of our consciousness, mine anyway.  So it’s time to stop and think for a moment about […]

Peer review redux

Tweet My students hate peer review, at least the way it is traditionally presented.  I don’t like it either. Students are not skilled enough to analyze each other’s papers well, even when the peer review is tightly targeted. My students love individual conferences. I combined them into one activity which would be suitable for a […]

Contemplative pedagogy: Names

Tweet Naming things is an important concept in linguistics.  People have cute, or crazy, or insulting names for people and things in their lives, and that is an area for productive study. Grandmother names are my present fixation — I am called Granna. I remember the struggle after 9/11 to find a name for the […]

The modern “you”

Tweet Most of the argument is about the singular “they,” but the singular “you” also has an interesting genesis, and this article in The Economist tells the story, or at least part of the story. The article concludes that social change has brought about this language change, though it does not draw any conclusions about why social […]

The language of guns

Tweet We should watch our gun language. The New York Times has an article today, “In Gun Debate, Even Language Is Loaded,” documenting the pervasive gun references in our language.  I speak six languages, and in thinking about each, I believe the article is correct — we have far more expressions, verbs, and nouns which […]