Teaching

Lists of tips

• My top teaching tips

• Checklist for slide decks and talks

• Checklist for term papers (for my students)

Feel free to use or adapt these teaching materials, with attribution!  I am also very happy to share homework, quizzes, or exams if you email me.

• Sociolinguistics

• Applications of Linguistics

• Intro to Linguistics

• Language & Computers

  • See my coauthored textbook, too! (I wish I had taken this class as an undergrad majoring in linguistics!)

  • Lelia Glass, Markus Dickinson, Detmar Meurers, and Chris Brew. 2024. Language and Computers. Berlin: Language Science Press (open access!).

• Meaning in Language (Semantics)

European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (University of Latvia, Riga), August 2019

• Course website

• Course notes

List of opportunities for linguistics undergraduates (summer schools, etc) 

Please email me if you have suggestions to add!

Some potentially fun in-class activities

• Scavenger hunt in the World Atlas of Language Structures, Google N-Grams, or wordbank.stanford.edu (idea from Mike Frank)

• Compare Swadesh lists to guess which languages are more related

• Check out the relatedness of various languages using eLinguistics' "compare languages" tool 

• Download Praat; measure everyone's pitch; then test to see if height or gender is more predictive (idea from Meghan Sumner)

• Learn about constituency with fun ambiguous newspaper headlines

• "Field work" on clause types (declarative, imperative, wh-question, yes-no question...) in languages spoken by students in the class

• Talk to ELIZA (old-school chatbot) or Mitsuku (award-winning current chatbot) and analyze their success

• Test the politeness or sentiment of sentences using automatic tools

• Use Google DialogFlow to build a chatbot (no programming required)!

Some other teaching materials

• Semantics activity

• Syntax activity

• Sociophonetics activity

Left: representing Linguistics at our Global Holiday Fest (party celebrating fall/winter holidays around the world), with PIE ("Proto-Indo-European") and an activity about the words for "turkey" across languages (photo by Emily Snelling). Right: riding the Ramblin Reck (our school's mascot car!) at the kind invitation of a student.

Teaching during the pandemic!  Photo by Christopher Moore.