Tag Archives: linguistics

Top 10 slides from my new book

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  • As I described in my previous post, each chapter in my forthcoming book is accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. The presentations display explanations and descriptions, diagrams, word lists, sample data from research studies, maps, quotations, images, and links to other images as well as articles and videos. Some slides provide instructions and supporting materials for in-class activities and take-home projects. The PowerPoints are in Spanish except for an occasional English translation.

The five PowerPoints contain more than three hundred slides in total. You can follow this link to download a PDF file that reproduces my fifty or so favorites, two per page. Besides its title, each slide is identified by its chapter and slide number. Please notice and respect the copyright notice on each page.

Narrowing down further, I created a SlideShare presentation from my “Top 10” of these slides, which you can click through below. It includes examples from all five chapters, thus representing my five “essential questions” for the Spanish language classroom.

Here’s why these slides made my Top 10:

  • Slide 1.21, because the Real Academia Española’s 1763 spelling guide shows both the invention of the inverted ¿ and ¡ marks (blue highlighting) and why the Academia thought they were needed (yellow highlighting). How often does one get to observe the invention of a new language feature? It’s reminiscent of Scott Fahlman’s invention of the first emoticon in 1982. As noted in the slide, the RAE actually invented the inverted marks in 1754.
  • Slide 2.29, because this is one of my favorite metaphors for the difference between pretérito and imperfecto.
  • Slide 2.43, because it illustrates the value of the often-mystifying “personal a.”
  • Slide 3.58, because it demonstrates the variety of languages that Spanish has borrowed words from. The PowerPoint version of this slide (not the SlideShare version), is animated so that students don’t see the “answers” (the language each word came from) until the profe clicks on the slide. There is also a more challenging alternative version that lacks the list of candidate languages.
  • Slide 3.78, because it shows that a little bit of language history goes a long way toward explaining irregular verbs in modern Spanish. A teacher can display this slide in class while saying something like “La forma irregular conozco viene del verbo latino original, cognoscere”, with an emphasis on the sc.
  • Slide 4.41, because the average Spanish student has no idea how many Latin Americans still speak indigenous languages. The contrast with the situation in the United States is startling.
  • Slide 4.53, because I was so happy to find a single illustration that covered so many sociolinguistic bases.
  • Slide 5.9 out of sheer vanity. This slide illustrates one child’s early semantic extensions of some early words: he extended manzana from apples to other fruits, guaguau from dogs to other animals, and agua from water to various objects connected with it. I was tickled pink that I came up with the idea of using colored ovals to neatly distinguish these three groups of words.
  • Slide5.23, because our students will be happy to learn that kids learning Spanish as a first language make the same mistakes that they do!
  • Slide 5.31, because these data on adult native speaker speech errors are not well known, yet provide a fascinating insight into the psychology of language. The thought clouds show what the speakers intended to say. The PowerPoint version of the slide is animated; students have a chance to deduce these meanings for themselves before teachers click on the slide to reveal them.

Book #2 update

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My second book, Bringing Linguistics into the Spanish Language Classroom: A Teacher’s Guide, is progressing toward its March 30, 2021 publication date. Although the book hasn’t yet shown up on Amazon it is already available for pre-sale at a 30% discount on Routledge’s website. There you can also see the Table of Contents, which is essentially a list of the linguistic topics the book covers.

To be perfectly honest, I originally conceived of this project as a way to promote my first book, my beloved ¿Por qué?. This is akin to having a second baby just so your first-born has someone to play with. (See also the plot of My Sister’s Keeper.) But like any good writer, or mother, I fell in love with the project for its own sake:

  • as a way to share important information about Spanish with my fellow teachers;
  • for the creativity required to design the in-class activities and take-home projects that accompany each linguistic topic;
  • for the challenge of creating more than 300 PowerPoint slides that teachers can use along with the book;
  • as a way to promulgate the five “essential questions” for foreign language instruction I wrote about here;
  • for the additional insights I gained into Spanish linguistics as I worked on the book.

I submitted my manuscript to Routledge at the end of July. At the end of September I resubmitted it after making some changes in response to a peer reviewer’s feedback. This step was very helpful, which is the whole point of academic peer review. For example, the reviewer pointed out that my section on the history of Spanish pretty much stopped with the conquest of the Americas (whoops), found some Spanish mistakes (¡Ay!), and suggested that I tackle the topic of preterite versus imperfect.

Routledge then turned the manuscript over to codemantra, a book production company based in southern India. (My contact there is a Tamil speaker.) They copy-edited the manuscript and sent it back to me for my own review, which I completed the day after Thanksgiving. I discovered some additional Spanish mistakes, such as a missing accent on marítimo, the invented word *colonista for colonizador, and closing punctuation placed inside quotes as we do in English, e.g. *La “a personal,” for La “a personal”, Between errors like these, and the English typographical errors the copy editor had turned up, I am forcibly reminded of one of my late sister’s favorite sayings, “There’s a reason why they put the word mistake in the dictionary.”

While all this was going on I was working with my Routledge editor on the book’s cover design. You can see the results in this blog’s right-hand sidebar, or click here. I found the speech bubble portion of the cover on the Getty Images website and thought it nicely evoked a classroom environment, The text I chose for the bubbles represents the range of topics and techniques in the book. I am a little worried about the legibility of the word rights in the rightmost bubble, but we weren’t allowed to monkey with Getty’s bubble colors.

Codemantra expects to send me the page proofs in mid-December. I will then have two weeks to create an index, a process I enjoyed when publishing ¿Por qué? There are professional services that will make an index for you but I can’t imagine anyone else understanding the book well enough to do an adequate job. That will be my last input before the book comes out in March.

Between each of these steps I have been working on a new research project regarding Spanish etymologies, which I hope to share with you soon, and also worrying about how to teach my first all-remote Spanish class starting in February. I have also purchased Instagram for Dummies and plan to put it to good use. So, lots to keep me busy!

Linguistics projects for the foreign language classroom

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In a workshop I recently gave in Atlantic City, I distributed the following list of possible linguistics-based projects for the foreign language classroom. They are adaptable for a variety of languages and levels of instruction. To download a PDF version, click here.

This list is a subset of the projects included in the companion website for my book, ¿Por qué? 101 Questions about Spanish. Here I divided them into the four categories of “Language history,” “The target language in the world,” “Language learning,” and “Language use”.

If you make use of this list, as an instructor or a student, please write back and let me know how the project(s) turned out.

Language history

  • Examine a few pages written in an older form of the target language. What are obvious ways that the language has changed?
  • Look up the origins of the words in either (i) a sample of text from the target language, or (ii) a specific vocabulary domain, such as clothing or animals. Where do the words come from, and what does this teach about the history of your language?
  • Research and create an infographic about a phase in the history of your language, such as the Golden Age of Spain or the Napoleonic period in France. What were the linguistic landmarks of these periods?
  • Research vocabulary borrowings into English from the target language. What do they tell you about how the two cultures have interacted?
  • Research the etymology of a dozen place names (names of cities, towns, etc.) in a country that speaks your target language. What does it this exercise teach you about the language’s history? Summarize your findings on a map or other infographic.

The target language in the world

  • Use Ethnologue (an on-line database about world languages) to gather data on where the target language is spoken and what other languages are spoken in those countries. Present as an infographic or a slideshow.
  • Profile a language academy such as the Académie française or the United States branch of the Real Academia Española. Who are the members? What are their activities and/or publications? What would you ask if you could interview them?
  • Research and present information about a language controversy, such as Catalan versus Castilian in Catalonia, or the historical tussle between French and Alsatian in Alsace.
  • What information does the most recent USA census provide about speakers of your target language in our country?

Language learning

  • Try to predict which features of English are most hardest to learn for speakers of other languages. Interview an ESL teacher to test your predictions.
  • Try a few lessons in the target language from Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, or other language learning software. How does the software try to teach the language? How is this different from classroom learning?

Language use

  • How might you reform the spelling of your target language to make it easier? Argue for your changes and transform a sample page using your proposed changes.
  • Pick your favorite language rule: ser vs. estar, passé composé vs. imparfait, and so on. Analyze actual text (perhaps a newspaper article) to see if the rules taught in class explain the actual usage.
  • Learn how to speak “Pig Latin” in the target language (e.g. Spanish jerigonza). A speed contest may be in order! What do you have to think about as you speak in order to accomplish this?
  • Find, watch, and compare instructional videos on some difficult aspect of pronouncing your language (like rolling your r’s). Make your own instructional video.