Teaching Introduction to Linguistics

A page with materials I developed for the course Introduction to Linguistics (LING 20001) I taught at the University of Chicago.

Overview of the class

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to teach the first core class for the linguistics major at the University of Chicago. I had an excellent group of students who made it so much easier and more fun to teach the course, given that this was right after the coronavirus started spreading in the United States and we had to do this course completely remote. I taught this course with Kathryn Montemurro who is an awesome linguist who focuses on sign languages (and who matriculated at the university the same year I did!). We tried the ‘flipped classroom’ format: we made asynchronous lecture videos, and then we hosted synchronous classes where the students had the opportunity to somewhat direct the trajectory of that module with their questions and discussion. Since it was after all an introductory course, Kat and I often prepared materials for each of the synchronous sessions to help guide the students and encourage them to go deeper into some material we considered important or interesting if they didn’t have any questions and just wanted more practice. I taught the sections on acoustics, articulatory phonetics, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. I was responsible for every aspect of my section: asynchronous lectures three times a week; synchronous class periods three times a week; office hours twice a week; creating exercises and solutions; creating homeworks and solutions as well as grading them (biweekly); creating and grading exams; and fielding questions over email.

Course goals

Kat and I wanted to use this course to do the following: (i) interest/inspire students; (ii) introduce them to basic analytical concepts in linguistics; and (iii) introduce them to emerging fields in linguistics (such as sign language linguistics). Ideally, they were also put in a favorable position to excel in each of the next core classes (phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics), but we did not focus on teaching to those classes. We wanted to build up linguistic intuition and instinct, rather than teach specific theories.

My philosophy

tldr ; I focus on few analytical tools and principles in detail so that students can understand the larger picture.

In the lectures I prepared, I really wanted to highlight the deeper structure in language, so I spent a lot of time teaching to the core priniciples I have found important over the years rather than introducing a slew of interesting observations (which is pretty common in an introductory class). I did this because I have learned from many mathematics courses that true understanding comes from doing, and I feel this is no different for linguistics. So, I focused on the system of linguistic analysis and its various components. In general this philosophy for an introductory course runs the risk of boring a student, which is all but a death sentence; however, I think if done well, this deeper knowledge is much more exciting for the student when compared to the bevy of interesting (‘shiny’) facts/tidbits they could have learned. In addition, it gives the student a much clearer impression about what linguistics really is, either better preparing them for the next course(s) or saving them time that would potentially be lost in taking one of those courses out of misleading expectations. To help mitigate the risk of the students being bored, I tried to make the deeper, more abstract connections more transparent and tangible by carefully motivating each analytical tool used in a subfield and strongly emphasized tools used across subfields. Doing this highlights the core principles on which these tools were developed, and these principles are paramount to understanding what a linguist is actually doing in the deeper sense. It also gives them the opportunity to do basic, but nontrivial analysis themselves. Presenting a list of cool linguistic facts only goes as far as a student can remember them; having them understand the tools allows them to actually do analysis, which I think is the goal and ultimately more fun. I tried to keep the wordiness of my slides to a minimum and tried to augment them with colors and diagrams whenever possible, as visual representations often clarify connections between concepts. (Also, note that the slides were accompanied with a video of me elaborating on each point, trying to motivate each part of the system for analysis.)

Materials

Here, I’ll present the materials that I developed for the course. Other materials were developed by Kathryn Montemurro. Remember these videos were asynchronous, so we tried to have two-three short videos (10-15mins) with slides for each meeting. In my slides, anything in grey means that I thought it was worth mentioning but not something I took the time to cover in the course. Major shout outs to Jeffrey Geiger and Anqi Zhang: at certain points in phonetics and semantics, I followed some of their materials pretty closely. Thank you two for providing such great resources!

Syllabus and course evaluations

Grammar

This is always fun and instructive to talk about. Although a bit detailed, a few students were quite interested in the optional material found at the end of the slides. Maybe I should write a blog on this lecture in particular… not that it matters too much outside of philosophical considerations, my perspective on grammar is a bit non-canonical.

Articulatory phonetics

The point where a lot of students understand the utility — and, subsequently, some of the limitations — of linguistics through the International Phonetic Alphabet and articulatory phonetics. We focused mainly on English articulatory phonetics, but I also had materials for sounds not found in English.

Slides

Exercises

Other materials

Acoustic phonetics

Albeit tedious and detailed, I love acoustics and how concrete it is compared to other areas of linguistics. Here, I basically just wanted students to understand what a sound wave is, what formants are, how to read a spectrogram.

Slides

Other materials

Phonology

I didn’t lecture this portion (unfortunately!), but I still prepared some materials for the students in both sections.

Exercises

Other materials

Morphology

I didn’t lecture this module as well, but I will prepared an exercise for students in both sections.

Exercises

Syntax

This was a major module, and I admittedly found it hard to make learning the deeper principles as fun as possible. This is partly because the basic principles actually break down at certain points, but I find it very instructive to still teach them to build linguistic instinct and to motivate the study of syntax. I think the students received it well, especially when it came to the homework. The lectures were a bit tedious, but I tried to make a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ homework, where they could work on very unrelated, but interesting phenomena in syntax, all using the principles and tools I introduced. I actually think this worked well… For any students in my class, I apologize if it was a bit laborious up front, and I hope the homework was worth it! :)

Slides

Exercises

Meaning (semantics and pragmatics)

I loved teaching this module. This has a certain nostalgia for me, as it was after my semantics (with some pragmatics) class with Professor Thomas Grano at Indiana University that I was inspired to apply to graduate school for linguistics. Tom, if you ever see this site, you will probably see the influence you had on me!

Slides

Exercises

Homeworks

Midterm

I won’t post the final, but I will post some of the midterm. It was three problems, and I contributed a couple of them. We ended up using the easier version of the Portuguese problem, which is still a bit tough for intro students.