Teaching
Lists of tips
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.
European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (University of Latvia, Riga), August 2019
Previous courses at Georgia Tech
Intro to Linguistics
Language & Computers
Applications of Linguistics
Directed Research
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
I earned a "Reflective Teaching Badge" from participating in a semester-long teaching workshop (Class of 1969 Teaching Fellows) through the Center for Teaching and Learning at Georgia Tech.
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.