Abstract
Students find linguistics at times abstract and intimidating and they have a hard time understanding how they can apply what they learn in our classes to the real world and how to relate their cultural/community experiences to it. As a consequence, we inadvertently restrict the pool of linguistic students. Inspired bywork done by Hudley et al. (2017), Trester (2017), Chávez & Longerbeam (2016), and by my personal experiences, I created a series of activities for my introduction to linguistics and syntax courses to respond to this problem. I offer some suggestions on how to make our linguistics courses more practical and relatable to our students, in particular first-generation students. The long-term goal is to organically engage and retain a diverse pool of students, thus enriching our field with their perspectives. We can achieve this goal by balancing teaching practices across cultural frameworks.
Highlights
Students find linguistics at times abstract and intimidating and they have a hard time understanding how they can apply what they learn in our classes to the real world and how to relate their cultural/community experiences to it
I want to center our conversation on first generation students in the field of linguistics, as this is a group that encompasses a variety of ethnicities, social classes and nationalities, yet is rarely discussed in our field
Our educational system and the field of linguistics is based on the assumption that our students share the same cultural capital when they come to college
Summary
Students find linguistics at times abstract and intimidating and they have a hard time understanding how they can apply what they learn in our classes to the real world and how to relate their cultural/community experiences to it. If we want to make linguistics a more diverse field, we need to present and teach the content of our classes in a way that engages students and is inclusive of all their learning cultures (Chávez & Longerbeam 2016).
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