Abbreviation Quiz

This "pop quiz" is an idea that you could use for an introductory lecture about some basic beliefs held by linguists or for introducing a unit on historical linguistics and language change. I came up with this activity to deal with the common belief in the general public (and held by many beginning students) that language should not ever change. In particular, we talked about opinions about the influence of text-messaging on written language and about a decision in New Zealand to allow text-speak on written exams. Some students wrote in their journals that they feared that young people growing up with too much exposure to text-speak would only know abbreviations and not be able to recognise the full forms that the abbreviations stood for, and that this would be detrimental to the continuance of written English as we know it. To raise this matter for class discussion, I made the following quiz and told my students jokingly that we were having a "pop quiz" that wouldn't be graded, but that I wanted them to do the best they could. Then I put the quiz on the overhead and gave them a few minutes to complete it.

POP QUIZ!

Without consulting any other source or individual, identify the full forms of as many of the following common abbreviations as possible.

	Group 1	Group 2	Group 3
1.	A.D.	AC/DC	BFF
2.	A.M.	AM/FM	BRB
3.	ca.	CBS	BTW
4.	cf.	CD-ROM	GTG
5.	e.g.	COD	IMHO
6.	et al.	HIV	LOL
7.	ibid.	ISBN	MYOB
8.	i.e.	UPC	ROTFL
9.	op. cit.	URL	TTYL
10.	viz.	ZIP	WTF

After giving the students a few minutes to record their responses, I put another overhead up with the answers.

ANSWERS

	Group 1	Group 2	Group 3
1.	Anno Domini	Alternating Current/Direct Current	Best Friends Forever
2.	Ante Meridiem	Amplitude Modulation/Frequency Modulation	Be Right Back
3.	circa	Columbia Broadcasting System	By The Way
4.	confer	Compact Disc - Read-Only Memory	Got To Go
5.	exempli gratia	Cash On Delivery	In My Humble Opinion
6.	et alii	Human Immunodeficiency Virus	Laughing Out Loud
7.	ibidem	International Standard Book Number	Mind Your Own Business
8.	id est	Universal Product Code	Rolling On The Floor Laughing
9.	opere citato	Uniform Resource Locator	Talk To You Later
10.	videlicet	Zone Improvement Plan	What The F(---)?

Afterwards, we talk about how many answers people got right in each column, what the source language was for each column (Latin, English, English Text-speak), and whether that shows any patterns about how we use abbreviations to express full linguistic ideas. Usually students get very few answers right in Group 1, get at least half right in Group 2 (but not all), and get most or all right in Group 3. I try to make the point that for the abbreviations in Group 2, we are mostly aware of what the concepts referred to are and can make use of those things on a regular basis without knowing what the abbreviations stand for, and I ask the students to reconsider, in light of this, whether it still bothers them that people might use abbreviations without knowing the full forms.

Answers always continue to vary for this question, and you can get some really good discussion out of it. I don't do the activity to force the descriptivist "language changes, so get used to the idea" stance on students, but rather to expose them to how easy it can be to form an opinion about other speakers' language use that ignores the reality of your own speech. I believe this activity opens up an interesting way to talk about this issue that forces the student to consider his or her own language use critically and not just to view English in terms of blanket generalisations about what older or younger people do. Naturally, many students will still hold strong prescriptivist tendencies, and this is a good launching point to begin to discuss why people hold prescriptivist opinions and what those opinions accomplish socially, as well as to help students understand that asking them to take a descriptivist approach in the course does not mean that they have to abandon prescriptivist attitudes entirely, just that they need to see why taking only a prescriptivist approach does not adequately describe the full range of language use.

Some students get more upset by this activity than others because they feel that, particularly with regards to the words in Group 1, not knowing the full forms makes them seem stupid, or at least less well educated. I never ask students to reveal their answers to this activity individually, and I try to assure them throughout that this is not the intent of the activity, and that I myself did not know the answers to most of the Group 1 words or about half of the Group 2 words without looking them up. However, some of my students were convinced that older professors probably would know all of the Group 1 answers. To prepare yourself to conduct this activity in class, you might consider giving the test to some of the most experienced faculty in your department (or better yet, in a range of departments if you can manage it) before your lecture to arm yourself with evidence that increased education does not necessarily mean one is fluent in Latin. In any event, be prepared for the eventuality that this activity will make some of your students uncomfortable and assure them repeatedly that you are not using it to make them feel bad, but to show them in a way they can relate to that language use is an ever-changing phenomenon.

Sociolinguistics Projects

Sociolinguistics projects are a nice way to get students interacting with people and observing language outside of the classroom. Here are a few ideas for projects that you can assign or let your students choose from. With any of these ideas, you can have students create a simple report including a hypothesis about what they expected to happen, a summary of how they conducted their study, and an analysis of the results.

Dialect Survey

A dialect survey is an easy way to capture students' interest and teach them about linguistic elicitation. You can find sample questions by clicking on the "Maps and Results" link of the Harvard Dialect Survey page (which you may also find informative for a class lecture on dialect differences). Have students choose a subset of questions to ask respondents, or assign questions of your choice based on the differences you perceive may be most salient in the region where you teach. You may want to require students to interview a certain number of respondents and/or to interview equal numbers of respondents from different age, regional, or gender groups.

Labov Replication Study

You will most likely teach your students about Labov's (1966) study of [r]-deletion in New York City (cf. Labov, W. (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). You may want to have your students reproduce such a study (if they live in an area where [r]-less dialects are spoken) or conduct a similar study using another variable. One where differences may frequently be found in urban and suburban areas is the pronunciation of "street" with either a stop or affricate realisation of the /t/ phoneme. You can have students pretend to be lost and ask directions to a locally well-known place with "Street" in part of the address (cf. Durian, David. (2007). Getting [s]tronger every day?: Urbanization and the socio-geographic diffusion of (str) in Columbus, OH. NWAV 35 Conference Proceedings. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 13(2), 65-79).

Colour Study

If you teach about the colour naming experiment by Berlin & Kay (cf. Kay, P., & Berlin, B. (1999). Basic color terms. New York: McGraw-Hill), you may want to have your students investigate whether and how speakers of the same language but of different genders name colours differently. You can have students collect paint chip sample cards from a hardware store and cut them apart so that the names are not showing, then ask respondents to categorise the chips by colour to see how many different categories are produced and what names are given to those categories. Some students also enjoy doing this project with students in different majors to see whether there is a difference in the responses of students of fine arts, liberal arts, business, or sciences.

Hesitation Study

You can have your students investigate stereotypes about whether men or women say "like" or "um/uh" more often. Have them select a task that forces respondents to think about the answer (for example, "Recite the alphabet backwards" or "Name the last five presidents/first ladies/prime ministers of Great Britain backwards") and pose as Jay Leno-style interviewers on the street. They can count the number of times a respondent says "like" in his or her answer, or how many times men and women say "um" versus "uh."

Language Micro-Teaching and Show-and-Tell

Language Micro-Teaching

If you teach a course in which most or all of the students have foreign language learning experience, a great project to incorporate into a second language acquisition unit is micro-teaching. I adopted this idea from a graduate pedagogy class in which individual students took turns, at some point in the semester, teaching a mini-lesson in their foreign language, with each student teaching according to a different methodology or approach for foreign language. The idea of this activity is to teach about pedagogy through example so that students can experience what a lesson in a given approach would be like.

At the beginning of the semester, I always collect information on my students' language learning experience. For this project, I use that information to group them by language (to the extent possible; sometimes I have to combine students who have studied different languages, and I just require that those who are unable to do teaching in whichever language the group chooses for their demonstration do some of the explanatory presentation about the method in English).

I have students do a background reading on different pedagogical approaches that have historically been used (I use Omaggio Hadley, A. (2000). Teaching Language in Context (3rd ed.), pp. 106-129. Boston: Heinle). Then I assign each group to a different approach. I always cover the Grammar-Translation Method, the Audiolingual Method, and Communicative Approaches, and if I have additional students, I cover additional methods as well. I try to match languages with approaches that teachers of that language are most likely to follow, where possible; thus, if I have any Latin students, I have them teach Grammar-Translation, and I usually assign the Audiolingual Method to Japanese students and the Communicative Approach to Spanish or French students.

Students are required to come up with a short (5-7 minute) lesson in their foreign language to teach to the rest of the class that demonstrates the key properties of their assigned approach. Then, I ask them to do a 3-5 minute summary of their method in English and point out the rationale for the method, the key features that were demonstrated by their micro-teach, and what they think are strengths or weaknesses of the method. When all the groups have presented, we do a class discussion on our personal experiences learning languages through different methods, what we think has worked best and what has not, and why we feel that way. This is often a great opportunity for students who have only studied one language other than English to see how their opinions about language learning may have been shaped by what they have already been exposed to and to consider critically what they would do differently if they intend to become language teachers someday.

I also incorporate a self-reflection as part of the grade for this project in which I ask students to write (in less than a page) what they chose to do in their micro-teach, why they chose to do it for their assigned approach, and whether they thought it worked well in class or not. I include as part of the self-reflection an opportunity to report what they personally did to contribute to their group's preparation, and whether they feel any members of their group did not contribute equally.

The key to making this activity go smoothly is that students need to understand that the point of the lessons is to demonstrate teaching methods, NOT to teach about their language. Particularly if you have students who are teaching about a less-commonly taught language, you may find that the members of the class get excited about the opportunity to learn about these languages and derail the micro-teach by asking questions about the language that your micro-teaching students may be eager to answer, but which may not be informative about pedagogical methods. You need to be clear from the beginning that the purpose of the activity is to talk about teaching methods and not languages, and you may need to use a strict time-limit to cut off groups that go over if you have a limited amount of class time. (I typically only devote one class day to the presentations, and part of the previous class day for in-class preparation).

However, students' enthusiasm about learning specific details about other languages is not a bad thing in a linguistics class. To encourage this interest, you might try assigning the next project.

Language Show-and-Tell

Come up with a list of languages from a diverse range of language families that have different features that your students may not ordinarily be exposed to (agglutinating languages, click languages, language isolates, sign languages, tone languages, etc.) and assign a different language to each student in the class. The student can prepare a 5-minute presentation on this language that covers where and by how many people it is spoken, what facts make it especially interesting, and, if applicable, a sound file or YouTube video of the language being spoken. (I discovered that students were never as excited as I was about talking about click languages until one of them asked if there were any YouTube videos of one being spoken, which there are). You can intersperse the presentations throughout the semester so that you only have to incorporate one or two a day, and you can schedule particular languages to coincide with phenomena you might want to lecture about. This can be a great way to get your students ready to start class and expose them to languages that you can't produce yourself rather than acting as the self-appointed omniscient expert. It's also an especially great activity for teaching about language diversity if your class includes a lot of students who haven't studied a foreign language.

Journals

I highly suggest incorporating a journal assignment into your course requirements. Your students will appreciate it because it can give them some easy homework points to compensate for what may seem like extraordinarily difficult problem sets. Lest you start to think that this is just a "soft" assignment, however, I like it as a teacher because it encourages students to look for connections between what we do in class and the way they see language being used in the world, and, more importantly, because it gives me a window into their thinking that I might not otherwise have. Journals provide my students with an opportunity to say what they are thinking so that I can see what they like and don't like about class, spot lingering misconceptions about points we've covered, get to know more about their individual personalities, and respond to them on a personal level with my feedback about what they've written. They are also especially useful if you are teaching students whose major is primarily something that you don't have much experience in; for example, if your class is geared to education majors and you have no education coursework in your background, you can find out a lot about what they are doing in their other classes, and how they are connecting those classes to yours, which comes in handy when you plan further lessons and activities. If that's not reason enough to use journals, they are both easy to grade and fun to read!

The key to a successful journal assignment is knowing what you want from your students and communicating it to them clearly. Decide whether you want them explicitly to journal about topics in the chapter you have been covering, whether you want each journal to be on a specific topic of your choice, whether you want them to focus on individual research and things they find outside of class, or whether you are open to anything that interests them (which I highly recommend). You should also decide whether you are willing to let the journal assignment serve as an open forum for students to discuss things they don't like about the class; I did this and I didn't have any problems with it, as I found that students were more likely to say they liked things I was doing but disliked things that the book said.

When you've decided what topics are acceptable, think about how you would assign a grade to each journal. How often are you going to collect journals? Do you care about the length of each entry or just want a certain number of pages turned in each time you collect them? Make sure you give explicit instructions about what you expect in terms of word count or page limits, spacing, fonts, and hand-written versus type-written copies. I also like to give my students fake journal entries that I have made up to illustrate what type of grade I would assign; I grade mine on a scale of "poor," "fair," "good," and "excellent" and show examples of what a journal entry that would earn each of those grades would look like.

You may also want to explore language and linguistics blogs to get an idea of what you might want to ask students to write about, or simply provide links to blogs to inspire your students or give them a topic-starter. You might be interested in looking at some of the following blogs:

General Commentary:
Languagehat
Language Log
Mr. Verb
Wishydig

New Words:
Word Spy

Varieties of English:
Separated by a Common Language
World Wide Words