Main Takeaways
Valuing and leveraging students’ linguistic experience and competence increases inclusion
Acknowledging individual and dialect variation is an important part of celebrating linguistic diversity
Discussing social aspects of meaning and challenging discriminatory narratives helps students to understand real-world relevance
Quick Wins
Changes you can easily implement to make a difference in your teaching and in the learning and experiences of your students
- Leverage students’ linguistic capital: Acknowledge individual and dialect variation and encourage students to share their own judgments and intuitions
- Consider what your example sentences communicate: Be mindful of the implicit messages in the content of the examples you use (for instance, choice of names and pronouns, gender roles, violent or otherwise disturbing content)
- Explicitly acknowledge linguistic discrimination: In emphasizing the linguistic equality of different language varieties, acknowledge the unequal status of varieties in society and discuss how this is rooted in factors like racism and classism
- Avoid exoticizing languages and their users: When discussing crosslinguistic semantics avoid framings that suggest that semantic variation is due to fundamental differences in the way users of some languages or members of some cultural groups view the world
- Acknowledge the impacts of neurodiversity: Be careful in centering neurotypical ways of communicating meaning as rigid norms and explicitly discuss how neurodivergent individuals may express or understand some types of meaning differently
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: Discuss features found in minoritized English varieties
Use varieties of English to explore the idea of semantic variation and to introduce social aspects of meaning.
Why?
- Using variation across varieties of English can help students to understand the concept of semantic variation
- Discussing variation in English provides opportunities to discuss linguistic discrimination and provide students with the knowledge to confront discriminatory language ideologies
- Incorporating varieties beyond Standardized American English that students use can help them to recognize the relevance of the course material to their own linguistic experience
- Examining different varieties of English can provide an opportunity to discuss social aspects of meaning
How?
- Incorporate lectures or problem sets on features of minoritized varieties to introduce or motivate different concepts (possible topics include variation in tense and aspect systems, negative concord, and positive anymore)
- Survey students on their use of different lexical or functional items or constructions and ask them about their intuitions on things like felicity conditions and social meaning
- In addition to analyzing semantic differences, be sure to explicitly challenge discriminatory views of certain varieties as being “incorrect” and discuss how these views are often the result of things like racism and classism and are not linguistically grounded
Suggestion #2: Focus on crosslinguistic semantic variation
Incorporate examples from a wide range of languages to help foster an understanding of and appreciation for linguistic diversity in the domain of semantics.
Why?
- Focusing mainly on Standardized American English can inadvertently reinforce attitudes of some languages and varieties being more “correct” or more worthy of study
- Centering English can lead to false ideas about how widespread or universal some patterns or categories of meaning are and can result in overlooking some semantic domains entirely
- Increasing the number of languages and varieties studied, and especially incorporating languages and English varieties used by students, can help students to see the relevance to their own multilingual or multi-dialectal linguistic experience
- Studying non-English languages in the classroom can help to make clear the distinction between object language vs. metalanguage, which can be obscured when English is used as both
- Exploring meaning in a wider range of languages and varieties can help students to develop a greater appreciation for linguistic diversity
How?
- Explore lexical semantic variation to introduce students to the idea that languages can differ in how they carve up different domains of meaning (possible topics include kinship systems, color terms, and encoding of space or direction)
- Incorporate lectures or problem sets using data from a wide range of languages, and try to include languages used by students as much as possible (possible topics include classifiers, negative concord, comparatives, definiteness, and tense/aspect/mood/evidentiality distinctions)
- Include coverage of sign languages, and consider discussing how some aspects of meaning, like iconicity, can be similar or different across modalities
Resources
SALTED Workshop on Inclusive Teaching in Semantics slides
Syntax and Semantics in African American English. Green, Lisa J. and Walter Sistrunk. 2015. In Bloomquist, Jennifer, Lisa J. Green, and Sonja L. Lanehart (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of African American Language: 355-370. Oxford University Press.
African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Chapter 1 (Lexicons and Meaning). Green, Lisa J. 2002. Cambridge University Press.
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project – Database of variation across North American English varieties
The Diverse Names Database – Database of names for use in linguistic example sentences