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LING-001 Introduction to Language
Every year hundreds of Georgetown students, with a variety of different backgrounds and interests, enroll in the Intro to Language course which is designed to provide an introduction to the scientific study of language. Our main goals are to teach the methods of linguistic analysis and how to apply these methods to language data. How can we describe the sounds in the world’s languages? What is an accent? How do bits of words combine? How are first and other languages learned by children and adults? What makes a sitcom funny or a politician sound deceitful? How is language used in context? As well as short lectures and work with data and problem sets, the course involves hands-on activities, like painting your tongue with charcoal mixed with water and then looking at the roof of your mouth with a mirror to see how you articulate sounds (palatography) and role-playing with classmates to find out how quickly cultural differences in communication styles can make a conversation go awry. Linguistics courses are both intuitive and memorable, because the concepts apply directly to your natural language. You may never think about communication the same way again!
Our course is quite different from typical introductory courses taught in a large lecture format. Instead, in Linguistics we provide a personal, individualized class experience. Our Introduction to Language class is taught in multiple sections, where each section is a small class with fewer than 25 students. Each of these sections is taught by a different instructor who is a dedicated, knowledgeable linguist eager to share their understanding (and sense of wonder) about language with you. Instructors are selected from our regular faculty, as well as our visiting assistant professors, and advanced, experienced graduate students. Faculty have all completed doctorates in linguistics and have taught this and/or other undergraduate courses before with stellar reviews. Our advanced graduate student instructors have all completed a year-long teaching practicum, and have been selected by the course coordinator based on their outstanding work with students in their prior roles as teaching assistants. All instructors follow the same course policies, procedures and assessment frameworks and teach from a mostly shared syllabus, tailoring some of the topics they teach based on their individual interests and expertise. This allows for a good balance of comparability and individuality across the sections. We want everyone to take from our introductory course the same excitement we feel for the field. Most of the chapters in our textbook, published by Cambridge University Press, were written by Georgetown Linguistics professors, many of whom regularly teach sections of Introduction to Language, and one of whom is always the coordinator for this gateway course. If you are majoring or minoring in Linguistics, Intro to Language will provide you with the background you need to succeed in other Linguistics courses. If you are studying a foreign language, this course will give you additional tools to facilitate that learning process. Linguistics has interfaces with a wide variety of other fields (e.g., anthropology, sociology, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, politics and the law, and public policy), so you should be able to make exciting connections whatever your background and interests.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
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