[OFF] Teaching: portfolios?

[Beverly Flanigan]

I've used Tim's idea in my "Language in America" course very
successfully.  I spend the first week or so asking students about their
language heritage, and often they don't know what it is!  So their first
assignment is to go home, call grandparents, or whatever, and write up a
linguistic heritage paper.  I also tell them to ask about problems or
difficulties their ancestors have had in learning English in America,
adjusting to school or work, passing on (or deciding not to pass on) their
mother tongues to their children, etc.  All this opens their eyes to
multilingual issues and leads us into discussions of bilingual education,
heritage language policies, etc.--and they get to know their family history
much more deeply than they did before.  (And I cite my own family "tree" as
illustrative--neither of my parents spoke English before entering school at
6; one endured teasing while the other apparently didn't; and eventually
they decided not to pass on their MTs to us kids except for prayers, songs,
etc.--the usual pattern, and one that students discover in their own
families too.)  After this segment, we move logically into the issue of
dialect variation (using Wolfram and S-E), and they're generally much more
tolerant of diversity than they might have been otherwise.

At 07:22 AM 9/8/00 -0500, you wrote:
>What a great idea for an item to include in a portfolio. Especially in the
>case of this group, the autobiographies would be very interesting reading
>for me, in addition to giving students the opportunity to relate just
>about all the course content to their own experience.
>
>Several people on teach-ling sent me descriptions of how they've used
>portfolios in linguistics classes, comments on what kind of course they're
>best suited for, potential pitfalls, and detailed suggestions for
>guidelines to give students. One person has her students do a multimedia
>"scrapbook of language artifacts"! Depending on how much more discussion
>there is on teach-ling, I can either summarize or get permission to
>forward messages, so if anyone here is interested, maybe the best approach
>would be to let me know off-list.
>
>-Mai
>
>On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Tim Frazer wrote:
>
> > This is for Mai:  How about linguistic autobiographies?  Where they talk
> > about their experiences with language variation == comments on their own
> > dialect or language, encounters with others.
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Mai Kuha <mkuha at BSUVC.BSU.EDU>
> >
> > > This semester, it turned out that many students in my 200-level Language
> > > in Society class are seniors, postgraduates ...
> > >... I'm wondering about having them assemble portfolios. I've
> > > never tried that before. Does anyone have any words of advice, especially
> > > on guidelines to provide and how to grade them?
>
>_____________________________________________
>Mai Kuha                  mkuha at bsuvc.bsu.edu
>Department of English     (765) 285-8410
>Ball State University


_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm