Linguistics & School

▶ The Association for Young Linguistics wants to spread enthusiasm for linguistics even among the youngest researchers, namely in schools. This includes several approaches:

Pupils to StuTS!

We are planning to create workshops that are specifically designed to show pupils who attend secondary schools in the host city the diversity of linguistic disciplines and pass on our own fascination for our field. These workshops will be given on the Wednesday before the StuTS. Enthusiastic pupils are more than welcome to join the StuTS conference in the days after the workshops as well.

If you are a pupil or teacher and you find this interesting, just let us know, preferably by email at vorstand [at] junge-sprachwissenschaft [dot] de or on social media. Currently, the following people are in charge of this project:

• Annika Schiefner
• Julia Egger
• Markus Jochim

Ask a Linguist

We are happy to answer linguistic questions that come up in schools during class, the preparation of lessons, or even in everyday life, far from school. The field of linguistics is extremely broad and is interested in topics such as

• language acquisition and learning,
• language change,
• grammar,
• pronunciation,
• language variation,

and many other fields. We will always integrate researchers and experienced students from the field in question.

Just send us your questions by email at vorstand [at] junge-sprachwissenschaft [dot] de or on our social media. We will get back to you as quickly as possible!

Linguistics to Schools!

The original linguistics for schools project (Linguistik in der Schule, LidS) came forth from the realisation that linguistics is hardly covered in language classes in schools at all and is always subordinated to literature sciences. We think that a better linguistic training in schools would not only facilitate language learning in the foreign language classroom, but also increase the interest in linguistic programmes at university.

Unfortunately, the project has lost steam over the past years and we would like to put some energy back into it. The documents below can serve as inspiration, be build upon, or be used in any other way. If you would be interested in developing this project further, please get in touch via (vorstand [at] junge-sprachwissenschaft [dot] de or through one of our social media channels).

We would like to increase the presence of linguistics in language teaching in schools, step by step. One of the reasons for the difficult standing of linguistics in schools is the lack of linguistic training in the teacher training at universities. We are therefore interested in a dialogue with lecturers in teaching methods in order to change teacher training curricula to provide a better training in linguistics. These attempts have already led to a number of lesson plans and presentations, which can be found below.

Lesson Plans*

In a first step, a number of lesson plans was developed within the project:

• Phonetik 1 and Phonetik 2
• Morphologie
• Dialektologie
• Etymologie

Presentations*

In the scope the project a number of presentations with concrete teaching examples were provided for a seminar on teaching methods. These presentations were intended to provide teaching students with specialist knowledge as well as practical examples for the use and/or transmission of this knowledge in the classroom.

• Ambiguität
• Kompositionalität
• Sprachwandel

Opinion Statements*

The LaFaTa (Landesfachschaftentegung Baden-Württemberg), now inactive, created an opinion piece on the education reform 2016 in Baden-Württemberg. A short summary can be found here.

*all documents are only available in German