POSTER A3. This presentation is part of the organized session on Scholarly Teaching in Linguistics in the Age of Covid-19 and Beyond at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. First generation undergraduates find linguistics at times abstract and intimidating. I offer a series of activities we can use to change the discourse in the classroom. We can help students self-reflect, apply the skills they learned to the job market, and discuss how to share their knowledge in their community. For the full presentation, visit this page: https://lingscholarlyteaching.wordpress.com/2021/01/05/poster-a3/

1. Diversifying the Field:
Activities to Make Linguistics
More Relevant
Iara Mantenuto
California State University, Dominguez Hills
Organized Session on Scholarly Teaching in the Age of Covid-19 and Beyond
Saturday, January 9th 2021

2. Content:
1) Cultural frameworks
2) Whys and goals
3) Starting point
4) Activities:
a. Jobs in linguistics
b. Meta-teaching: skills acquired and their use outside of academia
c. Tailoring the content to our students’ culture
d. Real life final project
e. Self-reflection papers
5) Testimonials
6) Conclusions and future plans

3. Cultural frameworks (Chávez et al. 2016)
For more details see additional material.
Individuated framework:
• The world is viewed and valued
as compartmentalized,
individual, linear, abstract, mind
based, contextually independent.
-> More common in academic
culture and college teaching.
Integrated framework:
• The world is viewed and valued
as interconnected, mutual,
circular or seasonal, reflective,
contextually dependent,
mind/body/spirit/heart-based.

4. Whys and goals
• Our students do not all share the same cultural capital when they come to college.
Balancing cultural frameworks in teaching means that students would be able to
apply their ways of learning in their upbringing to their learning in college.
• First generation students and other underrepresented students appreciate
relatedness, community orientation and practicality.
• In the US the dominant academic culture is based on the individuated framework
(originated in the Northern-European cultures), but not all students are from the
dominant academic culture.
• We want to present the content of our classes and teach in a way that engages
students and is inclusive of all their learning cultures. (Chávez et al. 2016)
• We want to engage and retain students, but if we only use one of the two cultural
frameworks we are not engaging all the students, and we are not offering the
opportunities to others to learn in a different way.

5. Starting point
• These suggestions do not entail major changes in our content in syntax,
morphology, semantics, etc.
• The content can be enhanced when we deal with intro to linguistics.
• Research and relatedness in this presentation are not mutually exclusive.
• These suggestions are about the how of teaching and testing students. It
makes us challenge what we value and how we relate to our learning
experience.
 The activities and points raised in this poster presentation were used in my
intro to linguistics and syntax courses at CSUDH. The classes were
asynchronous, but the same activities are transferable to a synchronous
setting.

6. Activity 1: Jobs in linguistics
Include information about possible jobs in linguistics in all your classes
at the beginning of the course.
This activity:
• allows students to talk with their families and friends about the
applicability of what they learn (beyond research).
• Allows them to see the material presented, and to ask questions, in
relation to the real world.
• Shows students that they can talk with you and approach you about
future decisions and about yourself (your job as a professor, researcher
and beyond).

7. Activity 2: Meta-teaching: skills acquired and
their use outside of academia
Explain how students will use the skills that they are learning, even outside of
academia.
• Whenever teaching a new skill (for example pattern recognition in
morphology) relate it to real life.
• Try to include a skill-based approach in your syllabus in advanced courses
(Zuraw et al. 2019).
These are some examples of skills for the skills-based approach included in my
syntax course. Note: traditional content is associated with these skills; students
reflect on the skills and they refer to each one of them (as part of a whole).
Skill 3: Identify derivational and inflectional morphemes.
Skill 9: Given a tree please write the phrase structure rules.
Skill 11: Explain ambiguous sentences.
Skill 18: Explain why we need a deep structure and a surface structure.
Skill 21: Draw trees with V-to-T movement.

8. Activity 3: Tailoring the content to our students’
cultures, both in terms of topic and identity
Tailor our classes to the students that we have in front of us.
• Some of the content I added to a “traditional” introduction to linguistics was
based on my students’ life experiences and interests.
- Linguistics and social justice
- Raciolinguistics
- Linguistics and music: the syntax of jazz, the whistling language of Oaxaca,
music instruments in Africa
- Heritage speakers and their language
- Teaching linguistics in k-12
- Second language acquisition and 1.5ers
• Use additional tools to learn beyond the textbooks and the handouts/slides.
- I used Lingthusiasm, The Ling Space, Crash course Linguistics, Signing
Black in America, among other resources.

9. Activity 4: Real life final project
Assign real life final projects that take into consideration “Culturally
Integrated Framework” Chávez et al. (2016).
• “Imagine that you need to teach something about your topic to
someone who has never taken a linguistics course before.”…
• …“Obviously, you will have to simplify what you have learned, yet
you have to be correct, you cannot teach them wrong information. You
also want to make your topic relevant to your audience. If I had to
teach my parents about linguistics, for example, my presentation
would relate to the experience of immigrants (my parents emigrated to
Canada in their late 40s), and I would simplify the words.”

10. Activity 5: Self-reflection papers
Include self-reflection “papers”, each one related to a topic covered in class, that
encourage students to reflect on their learning process. Make them short and
reflective, help them with clear questions.
• Alternate problem sets and assignments with reflection-papers, they allow students
used to story telling or writing to find a familiar way to express themselves.
Recording would also be acceptable.
• Linguistics autobiography, offer your own example (be vulnerable). Especially in
an intro to ling.
• Include questions on the topics that we know are more challenging, e.g.
compositionality, tree building. Or that might be interesting to relate at a personal
level, e.g. heritage speakers, raciolinguistics.
• Use the reflection-papers as an assessment tool, at the beginning and at the end of
the semester. It allows students to reflect on their learning journey and to make it
their own.

11. Testimonials
“…Through this course I have been able to open up and not only learn myself but
also incorporate some of the topics I have learned through out this course with my
students and colleagues. I learned more about myself and the language I grew up
with…”
“…I will apply these concepts when I interact with family members or friends in the
real world…”
“…I learned a lot this semester from this class, things that I have dealt with
throughout my life but never fully understood until I read through the lessons in this
class…”
“…For my future I always discussed that I was unsured what I wanted to do or
where I wanted to go but after this semester here at CSUDH and the help of you and
other professors I realized that what I really want to do now is go to graduate
school…”
“…The practices in this class [syntax] really helped me because the skills were
broken down and the purposes were explained…”

12. Conclusions and future plans
• This is a starting point for myself as well, to reflect on my own teaching and
who I am as an academic. Ideally, we all want to redesign and balance
pedagogies, assignments, activities, evaluations taking into account both
integrated and individuated cultural frameworks. Keep questioning yourself
and your teaching.
• This approach helps students to feel comfortable and it meets them halfway,
making linguistics more appealing and concrete.
• It makes the learning experience more personal and less “banking model”
(Freire 2020).
• It offers students the tools to share with their community and family what
they do in linguistics.
• It teaches students to think about life after college and how they can bring
back to their community what they learned in our classrooms.
• Most importantly: it makes everyone feel like they belong.
 Next semester, I am exploring cooperative learning, a piece missing from
this semester, with Critical Digital Pedagogy (Morris & Stommel 2020).

13. Acknowledgements
I want to thank the New Faculty Learning Community at CSUDH, and
in particular Dean Kim Costino and Dr. Keisha Paxton for introducing
me to Teaching Across Cultural Strength.
I am in debt to my students, for motivating me and continuously
teaching me.
If you have any questions and/or if you
would like any of my material please
contact me at imantenuto@csudh.edu

14. Bibliography
Chávez, A. F., & Longerbeam, S. D. (2016). Teaching across cultural
strengths: A guide to balancing integrated and individuated cultural
frameworks in college teaching. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
Freire, P. (2020). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury publishing USA.
Hudley, A. H. C., Dickter, C. L., & Franz, H. A. (2017). The indispensable
guide to undergraduate research: Success in and beyond college. Teachers
College Press.
Morris, S. M., & Stommel, J. (2020). An Urgency og Teachers. Hybrid Pedagogy
Inc.
Trester, A. M. (2017). Bringing linguistics to work. A story listening, story finding,
and story telling approach to your career. Lulu Publishing Services.
Zuraw, K., Aly, A. M., Lin, I., & Royer, A. J. (2019). Gotta catch'em all: Skills
grading in undergraduate linguistics. Language, 95(4), e406-e427.