My Fall Sociolinguistic Variation course (a diverse bunch of undergraduates, Masters students, and doctoral students) contributed posts to a class blog for one of their assignments. There are some real gems in there (in terms of sociolinguistic observation and analysis, but also writing) - check it out!
Fall 2016 Teaching
Enjoying that back-to-school feeling as I look forward to teaching two of my favorite courses! Course blurbs below; click each title for the syllabus.
LING 215: Sounds of Language (undergraduate) An introduction to phonetics and phonology, the linguistic subfields concerned with describing and explaining how speech sounds are made, used, heard, and mentally organized.
LING 481: Sociolinguistic Variation (graduate/undergraduate) Language varies: within speakers, across speakers, and over time. This course is a theoretical and practical introduction to variationist sociolinguistics, the subfield of linguistics concerned with understanding the relationship between variation and language change and with describing and accounting for variation in terms of the linguistic and social factors which underlie it. What are the objects of study in sociolinguistic research? What kinds of questions can we ask about the relationship between language and society, and how do we use quantitative methods to find their answers? We'll address these foundational issues, read classic and contemporary papers in the field (about old fishermen, Harlem teens, high school cliques, salespeople, frat guys, politicians, and other remarkable language users) and apply what we've learned to group and individual projects exploring particular cases of variation.
Hello Spring 2016
Here's what I'll be teaching this semester (click course title for syllabus):
LING 215: Sounds of Language (undergraduate) An introduction to phonetics and phonology, the linguistic subfields concerned with describing and explaining how speech sounds are made, used, heard, and mentally organized.
LING 414: Sociophonetics (graduate/undergraduate) Everyone has an accent. Moreover, everyone’s accent varies depending on who they are talking to, what they are talking about, what kind of personal identity they want to convey, and other contextual factors, and listeners accordingly attribute social meaning to the variation that they hear. In this course students will learn how sociophonetic variation in production and perception can be systematically studied to answer questions about language, social meaning, and the link between them. The first part of the course will focus on the acoustic analysis of conversational speech. The second part will turn to the experimental study of speech perception and social meaning, accent change over the lifespan, and the implications of sociophonetic variation for phonological theory. Students will develop skills throughout this course that will enable them to 1) make appropriate methodological choices when planning research projects in sociophonetics, 2) use tools such as ELAN, PRAAT, FAVE, NORM, and R to facilitate data processing, and 3) critically evaluate (socio)phonetic studies of language.
LSA Summer Institute at the University of Chicago
Hello from Chicago, where I'm teaching the latter half of Sociophonetics at the 2015 LSA Summer Institute (Lauren Hall-Lew taught for the first half). Last week's classes were on the sociophonetics of speech perception - how social information affects the perception of sounds, and how variation in speech leads to perceptions of the speaker. This week: accommodation, change over the lifespan, and models of (socio)phonological variation!
