Main Takeaways
Linguistics students and phonologists should be familiar with phonology for all language modalities, including sign, tactile, and spoken languages
Phonological data should be accompanied by context about the language and its users
Effects of racism, class, colonialism, ableism, and eurocentrism on phonological research and gaps therein should be discussed as early as introductory courses
Quick Wins
Changes you can easily implement to make a difference in your teaching and in the learning and experiences of your students
- Use modality-general language when discussing phenomena that are modality-independent: Define linguistic terms like phoneme with phrases like building blocks or bundles of features instead of speech sounds, and use terms like language user instead of speaker.
- Be clear what is truly language-universal and what is modality-specific: Remember that things like consonants and vowels are not universal phenomena in all languages.
- Acknowledge that modality-dependent phenomena exist and do not lessen the languages that use them: Being able to show there are universal phonological properties of languages is great, but students should understand that spoken and sign languages do not have to have perfectly similar phonology to be real languages.
- Leverage students’ linguistic capital: Acknowledge students as language experts and include crosslinguistic and individual variation as a way to encourage students to share intuitions from the languages and varieties they use.
- Explicitly acknowledge linguistic discrimination: Discuss the unequal status of linguistic varieties in society, how this can be reflected in how the phonological phenomena in certain varieties are judged, and discuss how this is rooted in factors like racism, classism, ableism, and xenophobia.
- Contextualize the language of study and its users: Each language or variety in your course should be accompanied by at least some context about the people and communities who use that language, as well as the language’s social context.
- Make sure to have captions and/or transcripts of sound files or videos: Check that any existing captions/transcripts are accurate, do not rely on automatic captions/transcripts, especially for linguistic terminology, and create your own if necessary. See the Accessibility page for more about accessible courses.
Bigger Impact
What more can be done to have a long-term, positive impact in your teaching and on your students’ learning and experiences in linguistics?
Suggestion #1: Devote substantial time to each language modality
Phonology does not operate identically across modalities, so future linguists, particularly future phonologists, need to be comfortable with phonology in each modality.
Why?
- Determining universal features and processes as well as modality-specific and language-specific features and processes requires studying all modalities
- Students who study sign phonology are required to study spoken phonology, but the opposite is not true, and students who are only exposed to phonology in one modality will be ill-prepared as linguists and especially as phonologists
- Every phonological phenomenon that occurs in spoken language does not have to occur in sign language, and phenomena that occur only in sign languages are equally important for students to understand as those that only occur in spoken languages
- Only teaching spoken language phonology contributes to on-going language deprivation of deaf and deafblind children based on myths that sign and tactile languages do not have sublexical structure and are thus not real languages
How?
- Check out sign language phonology for phonology teachers, a collection of books, chapters, articles, and related resources on sign language research across phonology topics, created by Dr. Kie Zuraw
- Include comparisons of phenomena and analyses between spoken and sign languages whenever you can, discussing the validity of both the similarities and the differences
- Dedicate a whole unit to sign phonology (not just a day) that explores the modality-specific features and phenomena and does not rely on each topic being tied directly to spoken language
- Incorporate work by Dr. Terra Edwards and Dr. Diane Brentari on phonology in Protactile ASL
- Discuss with students how denial of sign and tactile phonology has caused those languages to be disregarded and not considered real languages, and include how sign linguists and deaf linguists in particular have fought for language representation and access
- See the Sign Languages page for more about inclusion of sign and tactile languages, including resources for corpora and content
Suggestion #2: Incorporate diverse languages and varieties without exoticizing them
It is important to incorporate many languages and varieties to cover different phenomena, but do so in a way that acknowledges student experiences and does not make languages come across as atypical or lesser.
Why?
- Some phonological phenomena may only occur in a few languages, but that does not mean those languages or the people who use them are not utilizing the same language devices as everyone else
- If students in the class use a language you deem as “different”, they may leave your class believing their language to be lesser or abnormal
- If students in the class use a language you deem as “typical”, they may leave your class believing their own language to be better and more normal
- Exceptions to the “norm” or to believed-universals in phonology are an opportunity for discussion about expanding our notions of language, not claiming some languages or peoples are different
How?
- Survey your students about the languages they use so you can include those languages and help to validate their study and inclusion (see Getting to Know Students for more about class surveys)
- Openly discuss universality of phonological phenomena with your students to help them question these ideas with their own language experiences
- Include background information about the languages you include and their users, which could include the number of users, the known history of the language, and what events or research practices may have caused the language to be understudied or viewed in a certain way (Glottolog; Ethnologue)
- Be explicit in discussing all phonological phenomena as being a part of how languages and the human brains that develop those languages work
- Make sure students understand that the ways that standardized languages operate phonologically are not the baseline for “normal” and that even some phonological aspects of Standardized American English can also be considered rare among the world’s languages
- If possible, showcase more than one language for each phenomena to avoid students assuming there is only one language that does a certain thing (LEDIR datasets)
Resources
Four Inclusive Practices for the Phonology Classroom. Zuraw, Kie. (2021). Proceedings of the 2021 Annual Meeting on Phonology.
Sign Language Phonology for Phonology Teachers. Zuraw, Kie. (2020).
Work by Dr. Terra Edwards and Dr. Diane Brentari on phonology in Protactile ASL
Linguistics Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Repository (LEDIR) datasets for various languages and topics in phonetics & phonology