Abstract

Most students who are linguistics majors will not become professional linguists. Therefore, teaching of linguistics should be focused explicitly upon building the general skills of a liberal education that students will most benefit from, rather than only discipline-specific material. With this in mind, the university’s course on first language acquisition was reorganised so that all instruction was based around group-oriented projects. The hope was that such a course would (1) develop students’ skills with group work and research planning, (2) motivate learning through frequent interaction, and (3) increase student interest due to ownership of content. For purposes of comparison, the course covered similar content as a previous version that used lectures and an extended class project. Evaluation of the course is performed through comparison of assessment results across years, student feedback on an extended survey and the instructor’s experiences. Within the limitations of the study, the redesigned course did show evidence of interactive learning and teamwork skills while understanding of linguistic content persisted. Moreover, Honours students in the subsequent year continued to practise techniques developed in this paper.

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