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.
