Teaching

Teaching Statement

General thoughts on teaching

All team members at our Chair of English Linguistics enjoy teaching because it is a social activity and we are the social communicative types. Additionally, we believe that teaching also supports one’s personal intellectual development as a researcher and scholar because teaching forces you to verbalize and break down your thoughts and research results in a clear and concise way.

When it comes to teaching linguistics on an undergraduate level, we regard three things as crucial. First of all, and especially on this level, it is essential to build up a solid basis of linguistic knowledge and research and writing skills. When we started to study ourselves, we weren’t even aware of the fact that linguistics would be part of the curriculum and when we found out, we had various misconceptions about the field. This is why we want to inspire you and get you excited about linguistics in the first place! We want to open your minds minds to a more descriptive, scientific and cognitive approach to language, its variation and its change!

Second, linguistics is a borderline subject between the humanities and the natural sciences, which makes it necessary to introduce basic principles from both disciplines and help you overcome potential fears that might exist towards one or the other domain. For example, usage-based, morphosyntactic analysis is a difficult subject matter. We want to enable you to investigate morphosyntactic variation and change quantitatively and empirically, and for that you need a solid philological basis, acquire computation skills for handling the search programs and learn about the theoretical and methodological state-of-the-art of linguistic research incl. the use of (inferential) statistics.

Thirdly, we believe that it is necessary right from the start to support your individual thinking rather than teaching you how to quote. Obviously, it is very necessary to teach the intricacies of academic writing, how to avoid plagiarism and how to find state-of-the-art references, but we also want to support your creativity and your ability to set up empirical projects. At the same time, we try to strengthen your belief that you can contribute to the linguistic discourse by your own research! Additionally, in times of Chat gpt 4.0, we grade in a process-oriented manner which evaluates the learning process more than the final output. Often, our students have to give oral presentations during the term and we also give personal feedback on every paper/project proposal before any student hands in their final papers. Sometimes, when necessary, we will give you the option to produce a 2^nd draft of your papers. This increases the quality of your final contributions and guarantees joint reflection on the work process and progress.

In general, we try to overcome chalk-and-talk teaching from the front by asking the audience questions, by adding flipped classroom elements to my teaching, or by including several interactive 5 min. mini-breaks from our lecturing lecturing in which students have to talk to their neighbors and reflect on the discussed issues or do exercises together. We also use a range of online materials (TED talks, video clips etc.) to break up the sessions of instruction. In all courses, we draw on the latest research findings in the particular area. Most courses are accompanied by power point slides and materials on the StudOn online platform which enables us to announce, present and evaluate materials, tasks and assignments in a professional manner. We have successfully set up Multiple Choice exams, polls and all kinds of practice and testing options on StudOn.  In times of Covid-19, we are also very familiar with the didactics of distance learning (online/hybrid, streaming,…) and have been using e.g. Zoom, extensively for our teaching in the last months.

Finally, we are fully aware that many of you will become teachers. This is why we always try to point out how the research findings and theoretical concepts are relevant in the classroom when teaching a foreign language and its constructions.

 

Supervision of BA and MA theses as well as Zulassungsarbeiten

With regards to supervision, all of us have supervised many BA theses and MA theses. Here, we especially promote consultation in the initial stages of topic and methods development. The most important aspect as a supervisor in linguistics is to help you find the appropriate methodology for the chosen research questions and to set a project feasible in scope for their projects/theses. Constant feedback loops are crucial.

We (Sommerer – Klotz – Bloom) supervise topics in the following areas:

• Morphology & Syntax
• The Noun Phrase
• Corpus-based research
• Construction grammar
• Teaching of Grammar
• Diachronic changes
• Old English Structures
• etc…

 

On the graduate level it is necessary to support innovative and critical thinking. A graduate student (MA, PhD level) needs to contribute to the field by analyzing data in a state-of-the-art but work-alone manner and by developing ideas (models/theories/etc…) further, rather than quoting page after page. We believe that a department has to create an environment (individual office hours, weekly research meetings with graduate students, etc.) which is open for and facilitates such contributions. We also believe that on this level we should train you how to employ different methodologies correctly. Again, it is our duty to familiarize students with those different methodologies (corpus analysis, questionnaire-based research, surveys, interviews, experiments…) as we cannot expect you to know any of these, unless we teach you properly.

In general, it is also necessary to raise awareness for what counts as scientific evidence at all. Although we consider it absolutely necessary to teach and use quantitative statistical methods, it is also important to teach how to employ statistical tests properly and what they do not tell us. Next to teaching advanced content and advanced methodologies, it also seems important to discuss the means by which linguistic arguments are won or lost and the roles which plausibility and rhetorical persuasiveness play in such arguments. As teachers we want show that also in academic discourse there is a difference between persuasive arguments and legitimate arguments, and to help you learn to distinguish between the two. In the end, we aim to increase your practical skills in linguistic argumentation (to get better at making strong arguments, at detecting and attacking weak spots in the arguments and the research of others, and at defending their views when they are attacked). Something we try to teach in all of our courses. At the same time, it is crucial to teach how to synthesize existing approaches (theories, methods) and to adapt any theorizing to your own purpose. Vice versa, any empirical findings have to be linked to the theoretical and meta-theoretical level in an insightful manner.

For PhD students it is also important to function as a mentor; this includes finding departmental but also international academic venues for presenting their work to others (conferences, workshops, summer schools), even at an early stage. From the start PhDs need to network and get access to other researchers’ feedback and other research facilities and funding in general. Finally, we find it important to provide information about and grant access to HR courses on personal development and career planning in academia, especially for female PhDs.