Study of Language Workshops

We have developed a series of hands-on labs (or "workshops") that we deploy with all sections of our introductory linguistics course at William & Mary (LING220). Each lab can be executed with undergraduates in a 50-minute class, and we have run most of the labs on groups as small as 10 and as large as 80. Each lab is self-contained, and most do not require any specific linguistic background, so the order they are deployed in is flexible. Some workshops do work better if students have a little bit of background; for example, doing the syntactic processing lab is more meaningful to students if they have already covered the basics of syntactic structure!

The workshops materials are available here. We also have a forthcoming paper in Teaching Linguistics detailing the structure, goals, and execution of the workshop section of our course.