MarkShea_AppliedLing

ABOUT

Mark has a Ph.D. in Second Language Studies from Michigan State University.

Since 2011, he has taught in the English Department at Mount Holyoke College. He is the Director of the Speaking, Arguing, and Writing Center, and the ESOL Program.

Blog

  • GenAI Discussion Activity for Peer Writing Mentors

    In my writing center, we usually put together a self-scheduled ongoing education option along with our regular scheduled offerings. This semester we used a student post on Jane Rosenzweig’s The Important Work blog. Here are the discussion prompts that go along with the reading. I also included the debrief form items we use as a completion tracker and assessment–we put them into a Google Form that the mentors fill out to get credit.

    The Important Work is a blog run by the head of Harvard’s Writing Center. Read this post: “At My High School No One Is Talking About AI,” by high school student Sam Barber. Meet with your partner and discuss some of these prompts. You can address these in any order, and it’s fine if you don’t discuss them all. After the discussion, complete the reflection form to get credit for the hour!  

    1. Sam writes about their peers, who are making extensive use of GenAI, and the teachers at their school, who are pretty silent on the issue (except for saying “don’t use it”). And then there’s Sam, who feels set apart from both groups.  

      What positions on this issue do you see in your own academic community? Is it clearly defined as students and teachers? Who agrees with you, and who feels differently? How do the differences between high school and college play into this?
    2. Sam complains that nobody is teaching them to make responsible decisions about using  GenAI–does that feel like your experience? How have you learned about it? Is there a role for peer writing mentors in that process?
    1. Sam differentiates between using GenAI to cheat vs. using it as a (possibly unreliable) study aid: “Even when they’re not using AI tools to cheat, it feels like almost everyone at my high school uses AI in some capacity for their schoolwork.” 

      What do you think of how Sam draws the distinction–do you see a similar dividing line? Are there additional perspectives on access, equity, or technology you would add?
    1. One thing I noticed at the end of the article, is that despite Sam’s clear frustration, the solutions they propose are less about punishment and instead ask for education and agency from their teachers. What are you looking for from professors? from the college? from peers?   

    Debrief form: 

    Who was your discussion partner?

    What date and time did you meet? 

    What was one memorable idea, observation, or example you got from your partner?

    What questions/topics generated the most discussion? 

    What is one thing from your discussion that would be valuable to share with the rest of the Program?

  • Precision and Play

    Once I had set the course goals for my ConLangs course, I needed to identify topics and themes for the class to explore. As I pulled together potential materials, I could feel a gravitational pull towards a discussion of linguistic determinism (also known as linguistic relativism or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).

    When I design courses like this one, a course that has a poppier topic, I return to this guiding question: Do my students need a college course in order to interact deeply with this topic? And so that’s why, for instance, I don’t spend a lot of time on Klingon or Elvish in this course. There’s plenty out there on those topics. And while a lot of the information may not be academic per se, you can find a wealth of discussion out there without a college course guiding (and obligating) you to do so.

    Linguistic determinism rang that bell for me. It feels like the first thing people get to when they start talking about language in a SFF context. I do think it’s a rich, appropriate topic for academic exploration, and I have a lot to say about it, perhaps in a future post, but I wanted to expose students to some other topics in linguistics that might be harder to encounter without a syllabus guiding you.

    In the third iteration of this course, I feel like I’m finally really laying some of these themes out clearly for myself and my students. The question of precision vs play has been particularly productive in the first half of this semester.

    I included this scene from Babel-17 in a previous post. We see Rydra Wong solving a complex physics puzzle by considering it in Babel-17, a language engineered to be both brainwash the secret saboteurs and serve as their main weapon.

    She looked down at the…not “webbing,” but rather a three-particle vowel differential, each particle of which defined one stress of the three-way tie, so that the weakest points in the mesh were identified when the total sound of the differential reached its lowest point. By breaking the threads at these points, she realized, the whole web would unravel. Had she flailed at it, and not named it in this new language, it would have been more than secure enough to hold her.

    Reading this scene through the conceptual lens of linguistic determinism works very well. But it can generate really interesting lines of analysis if the focus shifts to questioning the value of precision in language.

    In Arika Okrent’s excellent book, In the Land of Invented Language, she has a couple chapters which focus on attempts to create perfectly precise languages, with no room for ambiguity or error. I love “A Calculus of Thought,” on 17th-century attempts to apply innovations in mathematical notation to all language. But when I assigned it in the past, it was hard for us to connect it to our other texts. Reading it against Delany’s version of a perfectly precise language has been great for class discussions.

    The theme of precision and language provides opportunities to engage with a range of thinking about language. This semester, I assigned “The Grammar of Play and the Play of Grammar,” a chapter from Joel Sherzer’s Speech Play and Verbal Art. As a bonus, Sherzer provides a number of examples of language features that served as the basis for some of our language creation activities. But what I’m really interested in is his discussion of ambiguity in language:

    Every grammar provides a set of rules within which, instead of rigorous, tight consistency, there is considerable freedom—that is, considerable play. . . .

    These inconsistencies and irregularities in form-meaning relationships are actually instances of linguistic competition and play, and they are often sources of humor for children as they learn them and resources for verbal artists as they exploit them.

    In Sherzer’s account, perhaps more closely associated with linguistic anthropology than formal linguistics, ambiguity and irregularity are not design flaws but rather essential characteristics of human language, resources to create art. Rydra Wong is a galactic poet, in a struggle with a precisely engineered linguistic weapon.

    What a fun conversation! By introducing the question of whether language should be considered a system for precise communication, I can introduce areas of linguistic thinking that an interested student researching on their own might not encounter.

  • Setting Goals

    Reading what others have shared about their constructed language courses in higher ed, I noticed that a learning goal for many of the courses was tied to linguistic terminology and practices; courses provide students opportunities to learn and apply morphosyntax terminology, or to develop effective language documentation practices. These goals map intuitively onto a course in conlangs.

    I knew I wanted to teach a course on constructed languages, but, I needed to think a little more carefully about identifying the course goals. There isn’t a linguistics program at my institution, so there isn’t a clear benefit to asking students to learn a bunch of technical terminology or disciplinary practices when there aren’t clear pathways to upper-level courses where they will use them. Nor is there an intro-level course that provides a baseline of shared knowledge for incoming students.

    Obviously, there is going to be some focus on language features and metalinguistic description–that’s part of the fun of the whole thing, but I determined that the most productive focus of this course would be a critical discussion of the role language plays in the construction of social and individual identity.

    Here’s the resulting syllabus language for my course learning goals and objectives:

    Constructing a language is an act of creativity, but conlangs can never be as complex as natural languages. Which aspects of language do conlangs illuminate, and which do they flatten? How do they critique or reinforce ideologies of oppression? We will approach these questions from linguistic, literary, cognitive, and sociological perspectives.

    Course Objectives (what we are going to do)

    • Develop academic writing skills through two extended writing assignments (5-7 page papers) and a revised portfolio
    • Situate questions raised by fictional conlangs within academic and popular discourse while developing appropriate critical and linguistic vocabulary
    • Critique commonly encountered positions and arguments about language and identify the assumptions and biases at play
    • Evaluate our own knowledge and research practices as we explore an interdisciplinary topic that spans popular and academic sources

  • Using Ria Cheyne’s “Created Languages” to incorporate literature

    This semester I’m teaching a course on constructed languages. I developed the course for the Fall ’21 semester, and this is the third time I’ve run it.

    I teach in an English department, and the course engages with literary analysis as well as with linguistics and materials on constructed languages in history and contemporary culture.

    In all three iterations of the course, we’ve read Babel-17 , by Samuel Delany, as our primary literary text. In the previous two iterations, I struggled to integrate our discussions of constructed languages with the way they showed up in literary texts. Basically, very few authors bother building out very much of a conlang, and when and if they do, it’s not the best generator for class discussion.

    One place this disconnect became very apparent was when I asked students to incorporate other class readings as secondary sources in their literary analysis papers. It was hard for them to tie a connection between the formal language structures and sociolinguistic phenomena we discussed and the way Delany presents the conlang Babel-17.

    This semester, I’ve had much more success by incorporating Ria Cheyne’s “Created Languages in Science Fiction” into our secondary readings. I pair it with the extended definition of conlang terms at the end of Nathan Sanders’ chapter “A Primer on Constructed Languages.”

    Sanders’ taxonomy is excellent, but in my course it is really helpful to have the following articulation by Cheyne:

    Even when created languages are discussed, an approach through the larger category of constructed languages will tend to slight them, for the chief focus is necessarily not on the functioning of the created language within the text so much as as on the grammar, vocabulary, ideology, and other features of the language per se–even though very few of sf’s created languages are presented in terms of extensive lexicons or systematic grammar rules. Highly developed languages as Elgin’s Laadan and Klingon are much in the minority.

    This framing gives students the space to adjust the focus of their literary analysis to thematic elements in the novel within a discussion of conlangs. As an example, in previous iterations of the course, students tended to reject the following excerpt from Babel-17 as an instance of language construction:

    She looked down at the…not “webbing,” but rather a three-particle vowel differential, each particle of which defined one stress of the three-way tie, so that the weakest points in the mesh were identified when the total sound of the differential reached its lowest point. By breaking the threads at these points, she realized, the whole web would unravel. Had she flailed at it, and not named it in this new language, it would have been more than secure enough to hold her.

    In this scene, Rydra Wong thinks in Babel-17 while examining a system of physical restraints and gains an analytic perspective otherwise unavailable to her. Class discussions on the scene were interesting, and I do think it’s valuable to discuss different definitions of key concepts. But we would get bogged down because I wasn’t successful in convincing my students to expand their definition of constructed language and then explore what that expansion made possible for their analyses.

    Cheyne provides a list of created language features that may appear in sff texts. Some of the items relevant for the above passage are the provision of “phonemic information,” “information about grammatical structure,” and “descriptions of other notable features of the language.” Cheyne’s list gives students a schema to fit different texts’ created languages into. As a bonus, students can situate Cheyne’s discussion of created languages within Sanders’ broader taxonomy of conlangs; this provides the opportunity to practice synthesizing multiple scholarly sources.

    edited 3/18 /25 for clarity and typos

  • 10 Texts (fall ’24)

    Here are ten interesting things I read, connected to research and teaching.

    • Do I have any set criteria for what gets included here? no, I don’t.
    • Am I consistent in what information, summary, and links I provide? no I’m not.
    • But do I at least alphabetize them? also no

    In addition to not being organized in any way, there are also 13.

    Brett Murphy with a Propublica article on a bullshit linguistic analysis that law enforcement uses to identify suspects on 911 calls. I had read it and not really thought about using it in the classroom, but we had an interesting discussion one day about the linguistics of lying, and it turned out we had a lot of ideas about using linguistics as a lie detector. So I sent this around and we had a good discussion. 

    bell hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice”: We read this in my academic discourse class. It was preparatory to an assignment where they write a brief piece about why they like something that they study. We did a comparison activity with a few chapters of hooks’s Teaching Critical Thinking, where she’s discussing similar ideas in a less confrontational way, to talk about stance and voice. We also used it to discuss citational politics and “theory vs. practice” debates in a variety of fields. 

    Sarah P. Alvarez, Amy J. Wan, and Eunjong Lee, “Workin’ Languages: Who We Are Matters in Our Writing”: We read this at the start of my academic discourse class. It did a great job of setting up different ways of thinking about personal identity in academic contexts and introducing the concept of translanguaging. We also used it as a model for collaborative work written in a combination of 1st person singular and plural. 

    William Arighi on “Claudine Gay, Plagiarism, and AI” in the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom: Man, this story was some bullshit. Good, brief discussion on a number of elements of this story.

    Rusty Barrett, “The Emergence of the Unmarked: Queer Theory, Language Ideology, and Formal Linguistics”: This was helpful background reading for me as I taught an interdisciplinary interdisciplinary course on language ideology.

    N’Jameh Camara on “Unpracticed Names” in Teen Vogue: This could be on my list in every semester. Intro classes, workshops, orientation groups, I use it all the time. Teen Vogue is my pole star–hope they’re ramped up for the next go round.  

    Gloria Anzaldúa, “Creativity and Switching Modes of Consciousness”: We read this as an example of a literacy autobiography in my academic discourse class. It works very well as a text to discuss paragraphing, sentence structure, and repetition of keywords to build cohesion. 

    Kendra Calhoun and Joyhanna Yoo, “African American English, racialized femininities, and Asian American Identity in Ali Wong’s Baby Cobra”: I’ve taught Joyhanna Yoo’s article on African American English in K-pop a couple of times, and it’s been a very interesting discussion. This article is a great follow up to that, and I thought the discussion on the limits of an linguistic appropriation approach to this question are really useful for my students to think through. I did a read-through of this article with a a senior seminar, but didn’t really get into teaching it. We had discussed AAL quite a bit, so the concept of AAL as overspecified was familiar. I would want to do more preparation for the idea of Asian-American as an underspecified identity before I read this with a class. 

    Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, “Towards a theory of linguistic curiosity”: Literally the day it was published, one of my students did a class presentation on scicomm, and, trying to wrap in our course content said “. . . and linguistics can be very helpful, since it thinks about how to communicate,” and I was like. “you’d think so but no, linguists seem generally uninterested in this topic” and then I got home and the authors had shared this on social media. A lot of my students are really interested in scicomm, so it was great to have this to share with them.  

    Brad Jacobson, Madelyn Pawlowski, and Christine M. Tardy, “Make your ‘move’: Writing in Genres”: I’ve used this piece as background for my peer mentor training course for a few years now. I really love the email activity they include and I’ve developed a bunch of expansions and add-ons. I think ‘moves’ are such a useful concept for writing courses and this piece does a great job presenting it at an appropriate technical level. Teaching an explicit academic writing course again this year led me back to a lot of the Writing Spaces content, like the Alvarez at al. piece above.

    Monica Heller and Bonnie McElhinny, Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History: I read this book sometime around 2020 and it was such helpful context for me, as my teaching focus has shifted quite a bit toward areas it covers. I taught it for the first time this semester. We built the first half of the semester around it, did a chapter each class meeting (two a week). Students signed up to be Discussion Leads for each chapter (I took the first and last). It went really great and served as a strong foundation for a variety of conversations in the second half of the semester. 

    Rob Podesva, “The California Vowel Shift and Gay Identity” Over a couple sessions in my senior seminar, I did a quick history of North American variationist sociolinguistics for the students who are all outside the discipline. Excerpts from this piece worked really well–it’s got region, identity, very meticulous phonology work–which even if the students don’t totally understand has very fun vowel plots–and characterological figures that demonstrate how to wrap in pop culture. 

    Karla D. Scott, “Crossing cultural borders: ‘girl’ and ‘look’ as markers of identity in Black women’s language use”: I’ve always found this to be a great article: very useful history of research on the linguistics of (Black) women’s speech, great excerpts that let you hear the participants, very focused and accessible target structures. But it never really felt right for me to teach it, based my own positionality. But one of my students was writing a paper on the linguistics of women’s language, so I pulled it out for her, and then discourse markers came up in a grammar course I teach for an Associate’s program for low-income women, and I had it to hand. They loved it, and I’ll incorporate it more next time I teach the course.