Office of Graduate Studies

Marjorie Pak
Linguistics

When I began teaching undergraduates at Penn last fall, I relied heavily on the skills I had developed as an ESL instructor before graduate school. I knew that I enjoyed teaching. Many of my previous students had told me they liked me because I made difficult concepts clear, because I seemed excited about the material, and because I was approachable and friendly and willing to spend extra time helping them. The important lesson I have learned this year is that these qualities – clarity, enthusiasm, energy, and generosity of spirit – are essential to successful teaching, but not always sufficient. I have discovered that the benefit to students increases dramatically when I step back and create what I call “guided confusion” from time to time.

Linguistics 001 (Introduction to Linguistics), which I taught in the fall, is a survey course in theoretical linguistics with no prerequisites. In my two recitations I concentrated on creating a nonthreatening atmosphere where students would feel comfortable asking questions. I worked hard to achieve this goal – I studied the roster and memorized students’ names; I sent emails to the class listserve with helpful information about homeworks; I replied promptly to students’ emails and wrote detailed comments on their assignments; I made a note of any topics that Professor Liberman did not have time to address in detail in lecture and made sure to bring them up them in section. Several students thanked me for the extra help I gave them, especially while they were working on their final projects. Still, I was not completely satisfied at the end of the semester. One of the sections I had taught had never really taken off – the students were slow to volunteer answers and rarely asked questions of their own, and I never knew if I was moving through the material too quickly or too slowly. At the end of the semester I was anxious to see what they said in their evaluations, but then I found out that they were not asked to evaluate their TAs.

Faced with a new teaching assignment at the beginning of this semester, I thought carefully about how I could get students more involved in discussion during recitations. Linguistics 102 (Introduction to Sociolinguistics), like Linguistics 001, is an introductory course with no prerequisites. The heart of the course is the three field assignments, where students collect their own linguistic data by conducting surveys or site observations (on /r/ deletion, for example). This information is assembled into a master spreadsheet, usually containing several thousand data points, which each student is required to analyze in a written report. Meanwhile, students are mastering the basics of theoretical linguistics, reading literature on sociolinguistic methods, and learning basic statistical techniques. There is no course textbook. Professor Labov covers the necessary material in lecture and posts readings on the class Blackboard page.

During the second section meeting of the semester – right after the students had finished collecting data for their first field assignment – I asked them to sit in pairs, introduce themselves to each other, and spend a few minutes talking about their experiences with the field project. I gave them a list of questions for guidance (How long did each interview take? Did people seem to enjoy the survey? Were you able to distinguish the different sounds? and so on). After an awkward silence, the students formed pairs and started talking, and quite soon they were engaged in lively discussions. I knew that a lot of them had had fun with the assignment and were eager to talk about it, and this activity gave them a chance to get to know one another. Since then, I have never had any trouble encouraging discussion in class. Whenever I ask a question there are several volunteers ready with answers. We have debated the best way to display information, methodological weaknesses in the papers they have read, and what distinguishes various dialects of English, among other topics, and I learn something new in every class.

I also started experimenting with different ways to teach material. This is what I earlier referred to as “guided confusion” – instead of explaining everything myself, I created exercises where students had to arrive at their own solutions. My model for this technique is Professor Maribel Romero, who stops periodically in the middle of her semantics class to make students solve problems. Following her example, I prepare handouts that first provide introductory material and then challenge students to work through exercises. The problems are difficult, incorporating material that hasn’t been explicitly covered in lecture, and in order to figure them out students usually have to work in small groups. For example, after Professor Labov had demonstrated how to calculate chi-square with Excel in lecture, I put together a handout where students had to figure out how the test works and solve a sample problem. I was gratified when every student who had been in my recitation that day answered the chi-square problem on the midterm perfectly.

Knowing that I wouldn’t be evaluated at the end of the semester – and that even if I was, the feedback would come too late to be useful – I created my own evaluation forms, which I distributed during our fifth meeting. I asked students to rate their level of comfort in the class and the appropriateness of the pace, and I solicited suggestions for improvement and topics that they wanted to discuss. I emphasized that the form was voluntary and anonymous, but most of them filled it out and their feedback reassured me that my recitations were meeting their needs. Several of them indicated that they wanted to learn more about the Philadelphia accent, so a few weeks later I created a handout about Philadelphia dialect features and brought some recordings for students to listen to in class. By that point students were expected to know about distinctive vowel features, so the handout simply gave a list of technical descriptions and asked them to provide sample words and demonstrate how they would be pronounced.

I believe that by demanding more of students, I have improved the quality of my teaching. I still place high demands on myself – I give detailed feedback; I meet with students who make errors and give them a chance to redo their work; I assemble excerpts from students’ reports and project them in class so that they can learn from one another’s studies; I regularly check the Excel Tips discussion board I set up on Blackboard and respond to every post; and I make all the handouts I created available on my homepage. I have also learned quite a bit about teaching from working with Bill Labov. I am deeply impressed with the amount of time he spends preparing materials for this class, and I know that students appreciate his sense of humor. He infects students with an interest in the topic.

As a student, I know that my favorite classes have been those that left me curious and wanting to learn more, where I could understand everything but only if I concentrated, where I was given opportunities to use my knowledge, and where I felt I understood the basic material well enough to find out more on my own. My goal in teaching is to enable as many students as possible to come away with this experience.

Graduate Student Center

Research at Penn

Penn News