Linguistics, Language & Culture: Human Ecological Approach

The course provides students a compact immersive experience in Yucatecan culture and Spanish language through a self-directed and individualized program. This course is primarily directed towards students who have previously completed the Yucatán program or are in their final year of studies and have at least an intermediate level of Spanish. Depending on the student, the activities in the class may be entirely project based or more focused on directed coursework with instructors in the Yucatán Program. Either way the students' work will take place on the Yucatán Peninsula and last four weeks.This course requires active student engagement in the preparation of the project as well as during the project. If you are interested in this course, please contact the instructor well in advance.

It’s through language that we construct our identities in everyday, professional, and academic contexts. We use language to make sense of our experiences and our ever-changing identities, whether these are national, social, local and/or global identities. Languages, cultures, and identities are intimately connected, but not all languages or people are treated as equal. So-called standard varieties of language are dominant in the media, entertainment, official documents, and education. In contrast, speakers of perceived non-standard varieties have been excluded and marginalized in different ways. Language can be used to exercise power over others on the basis of perceived linguistic divergence. While language and discourse are embedded in social issues, they remain invisible and are often absent from discussions about social issues. Using identity as the entry point to understand human experiences, this class examines how identity intersects with linguistic diversity, cultural practices, the creation and maintenance of social hierarchies, and asymmetrical power relations in everyday, professional, and educational settings. How do ideas about language maintain and perpetuate stereotypes and social hierarchies? Where do language standards come from? Do only foreigners have accents? We will use readings from applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, migration studies, rhetoric and composition and other related areas to examine these questions and many more. The projects for the course will explore various aspects of identity and its connection to linguistic diversity and social issues through readings, interviews, and spoken/written narratives, which will be used to produce a podcast. Through genre and rhetorical analysis activities, we will explore different genres and podcasts to develop an understanding of writing and how people construct identities through discursive choices and multimodal elements. These activities will develop your understanding of connections between genre conventions and rhetorical situations and support your overall development of writing, in particular metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities. In addition to these skills, you will learn technical skills to produce an audio piece to tell your and other people’s (counter)stories to challenge dominant narratives about language, linguistic diversity, and identities. The audio production skills you will learn include recording, importing, mixing, editing, mastering, and exporting sound. You will be assessed based on participation in small and whole group activities, reading responses, literacy narratives, reflections, engagement with course materials, peer-review workshops, participation during a series of audio-production exercises, preparation for and completion of recordings, and the production of a short podcast episode incorporating all of the skills learned throughout the term. Please note that the course content is similar to College Seminar: “Soda, Pop, or Coke?”: Linguistic Diversity and Research for Change: Writing, Language, Social (In)justice, thus, this course is recommended for those who haven’t taken the previous courses as the content is similar.

The European Union is a fascinating, ongoing experiment in international cooperation. Currently twenty-eight countries have joined together in a supra-national political and economic union, creating a political entity unique to a world of sovereign individual nation-states. This course focuses on understanding this complex and evolving union through study of its main political institutions: the European Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, and the European Commission. We will look at the workings of and functional relationships between these institutions through readings, meetings with politicians, bureaucrats, and NGOs involved in European-level politics, and visits to each of the institutions during two weeks in Brussels. We will also spend some time in the course looking at the broader political and cultural context in which the institutions operate, through examination of several important current topics in European politics. Topics could include: refugees and migrants in Europe, the reauthorization of the Common Agricultural Policy, Brexit, the rise of right-wing movements across countries in the EU. Students will be evaluated based on participation in class discussions, a reflective journal kept during their time in Brussels, and a presentation and final essay on a current EU-relevant political issue of their choosing.

This course provides students with an immersion experience in the language and culture of the Yucatán Peninsula. The course aims to increase student’s abilities to navigate the linguistic and cultural terrain of another society in sensitive, ethical, and effective ways. Class sessions, visiting lecturers, field trips, and readings will provide background on the history and anthropology of Yucatecan culture. Immersion experiences and living with a family will provide one important source of experiential learning. A second source takes the form of an independent project developed by each student based on the student’s interests. This practicum experience involves weekly activities during the term and an intensive independent project during the last three weeks. During these final three weeks, students live in a community of the students choosing, provided the location is relevant to their study and project. While each student is completely free to create their own unique project, past projects have included: creating a children's book, filming a documentary about the families work as ‘Mayan Dancers’, organizing classes for the children in the community, and participating in a crocodile research project. Evaluation is based on participation in the project as well as the final project presentation.

This course is offered through collaboration with CAVILAM as part of the COA program in Vichy, France. Students take 20 hours a week of language classes and workshops taught by immersion methods and advanced audio-visual techniques. Students live with host families in homestays and take part in a variety of cultural activities. They are carefully tested and placed at levels appropriate to their ability and are expected to advance in all four language skills - reading, writing, speaking and listening - as gauged by the European Erasmus scale of competency.

The goal of this course to help each student design and implement an effective learning program for the study of a language of her choice at whatever level of learning she is currently at. A very wide variety of general strategies, resources and practical advice for independent language learning are reviewed in weekly class sessions along with progress and reflection reports from each student that can help guide and motivate independent work. The core common text for this work will be Betty Lou Leaver, Madeline Ehrman and Boris Shekhtman’s "Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition". The primary focus of the class is on the development and implementation of each student’s individually designed plan for learning a language of their choice. Materials for this will be identified by each student as part of their work on their chosen language. Progress in these plans are discussed in one on one weekly meetings with the teacher. Plans may include the use of software, peer tutors, Skype, videos, standard texts, flash cards, specialized technical material, music, visual art, field trips, and a wide variety of other materials as appropriate. Evaluation will be based on the clarity, coherence and effectiveness of the student’s developed plan and the discipline with which they actually pursue it and revise it appropriately as the term progresses. Students will be asked to meet with the instructor prior to the start of the term to discuss their motivation, aims, possible resources and possible plans for language learning after the course is over.