On behalf of LEAP (Linguistics Education and Pedagogy), the department’s outreach effort to K-12 students, Christopher Legerme, Cora Lesure, Vincent Zu (MIT Chem E), and Jacob Kodner (Harvard Linguistics) designed and team-taught a Saturday high school linguistics course at Spring HSSP, an initiative of the student-run MIT ESP (Educational Studies Program). The six-week-long course, An Introduction to Linguistics: The Science of Language, concluded last Saturday.
Across the six weeks, students examined the linguistics of poetry, as well as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and machine learning in diverse languages. The teaching team focused on bringing to students’ awareness their unconscious knowledge of language, using the tools of science to formulate and test ideas about the hidden structures of language, and identifying and appreciating similarities as well as differences across diverse languages. The 15 high school students who attended each week can now answer the question that Cora posed to them the first day, What is Linguistics?
The course grew out of earlier work that the team has done, both individually and collectively, at Spark and Splash, day-long events also organized by MIT ESP, as well as in partnership with teachers for Maya Honda’s Linguistics in K-12 Education seminar.
