Discussion is a central part of this course and your participation in weekly online discussions counts for 15% of your overall grade. We will conduct class discussions through a listserv. As soon as you register for the course, you should send me an email message (nltaylor@email.arizona.edu) indicating your first and last name and your email address. I will then add you to the class listserv and you will receive a welcome message from the listserv with instructions for sending messages to the list.

Below is a weekly schedule of discussion questions. There will be one question/topic per week and you are REQUIRED to contribute at least one meaningful and substantial response for each question/topic. Your discussion contributions MUST be grounded in the course readings. That is, you need to explicitly relate your ideas for each discussion contribution to the readings for that week. Additionally, you are encouraged to respond to comments your classmates make in their discussion contributions, refer to news stories or magazine articles you may have heard or read that relate to topics being discussed, and talk about relevant personal experiences.

Keep in mind that there are no right or wrong answers for the discussion questions--the purpose of discussion in this course is to engage in meaningful dialogue. Also, as you read articles and do practice exercises for the class, you should feel free to post questions regarding things you do not understand or post ideas you wish to share with your classmates. In an impersonal online class environment where we never meet each other face to face, I hope that the listserv will help to create a learning community that enables us to exchange ideas and learn from one another.

Week 1 (6/5-6/9)

There is no "discussion question" for this week. Instead, you are required to do an introductory assignment. This introductory assignment counts as part of your discussion grade.

Week 2 (6/12-6/16)

To what extent are people’s individual dialect features conscious and/or controllable? For example, professor Norma Mendoza-Denton studies Latina gang girls in California. A dialect feature of these gang girls is creaky voice. She knows that their use of creaky voice is controlled by them in the sense that they consistently use creaky voice in the context of their peer group only during specific kinds of stories about specific topics, but never in front of their parents or teachers. However, when asked about their use of creaky voice, the girls are not conscious of their usage pattern or even that they use creaky voice. What is the difference between being conscious of a dialect feature and controlling one’s usage of dialect features. What kinds of speaking processes are accessible to our consciousness and what kinds of processes are below our levels of consciousness? Can you think of examples from your own language experiences that can further illustrate these ideas?

Week 3 (6/19-6/23)

There are many levels of variation in language. Lexical variation is at the level of the word. Examples of this include "gumband" vs. "rubberband," "curb" vs. "burm," and "median" vs. "esplinade." Syntactic variation is at the level of the sentence and involves the actual structure of how the language is put together grammatically. An example of this is "going to" vs. "fixing to." Pragmatic variation is at the level of social practice and involves the unwritten rules of social interaction. An example of this is "Can I have a drink of your soda?" vs. "Let me get a drink of your soda." Pragmatic variation also includes rituals of offering food/drink to guests, saying goodbye, and teasing.

Can you think of other examples from your own personal experience that demonstrate each of the levels of variation discussed above (lexical, syntactic, pragmatic)? Which level do you think plays the greatest role in language attitudes and stereotypes?

What are some common language stereotypes that you are aware of? For example, "New Yorkers are rude" or "Southerners are slow." What levels of linguistic variation contribute to these stereotypes?

Think about what contributes to language attitudes in an even broader social sense? In other words, how is language political? Why do people feel invested in maintaining language stereotypes? What is in it for us?

Week 4 (6/26-6/30)

The notion of hypercorrection as an index of dialect esteem is controversial in sociolinguistics. Why do you suppose this is? What are the ramifications of a theory that asserts women or people of lower socioeconomic status try to emulate men and people of higher socioeconomic status? What do you think about this theory? What do you think about Labov's and Trudgill's explanations for linguistic change through contact and dialect mixture?

Week 5 (7/3-7/7)

I mentioned in the introduction to Unit 6 that the Queen’s vowel shift has significant implications for RP? What are these implications? HINT: Think about what the concept of a standard dialect means and whether or not such a concept implies constancy or allows for change. What are broader social implications of accepting a particular dialect as "standard"?

Week 6 (7/10-7/14) **THIS WEEK'S DISCUSSION COUNTS TWICE BECAUSE IT REQUIRES A LOT MORE WORK!**

Try to identify where in Chaucer's writings the historical shifts that you read about in Wells later occurred via the Great Vowel Shift by listening to online readings of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Look at both spelling and pronunciation. For example, where you see a 'gh' in a word, notice how it is pronounced. Is it pronounced with a voiceless velar fricative / x / in a word that would now either leave the 'gh' silent (dough) or or be pronounced as a labiodental fricative / f / (cough)? If so, then this is an example of the velar fricative shift described by Wells on pp. 189-190.

You can listen to excerpts from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on "The Chaucer Metapage":

http://academics.vmi.edu/english/audio/audio_index.html

Listen to lines 1-18 of the general prologue (read by Tom Hanks)

Listen to lines 3271-3306 of the Miller's tale (read by Alfred David)

If you have trouble understanding what the modern equivalents of the word are, you can also look at at interlinear translations of these excerpts on the "Geoffrey Chaucer Page":

http://icg.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/gp-par.htm (The General Prologue)

http://icg.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/milt-par.htm#TALE (The Miller's Tale)

Week 7 (7/17-7/21)

For Unit 9, you read a section of the LSP entitled "Langauge and Identitiy." This section suggests that Canadian English struggles to distinguish itself from its "parent" dialects (RP and GenAm) in order to create a distinct Canadian dialect. Compare what you read of Canadian English's phonetics and phonology with what we have learned about the phonetics and phonologies of GenAm and RP. What similarities and differences do you find between Canadian English and it's "parent" dialects.

At this point in the course, I want us to begin thinking more critically about the theoretical notion of "language and identity" because it will be an important issue for the specific dialects we explore during the remainder of the course. What do you think it means to construct individual and group identities through language? What are some other (non-linguistic) ways in which individuals and groups construct identities?

Week 8 (7/24-7/28)

For this discussion, I would like to explore the soci-political issues surrounding dialect differences. Rickford presents the public sentiment against accepting AAE in public schools as a covert form of racism against African-Americans that is perpetuated by the media. He asserts that the media manipulated the Ebonics controversy by presenting only one side of it. "Covert racism" is a phrase coined by Jane Hill in reference to "mock" or "junk" Spanish. Examples of "mock" Spanish include "Casa de PeePee" for a restroom sign, "Hasta La Vista Baby" as precursor to violence in movies, and the Taco Bell dog as a symbol of the stereotypical Mexican-American male. Hill asserts that in our hyper-sensitive politically correct American culture in which overt racism is considered inappropriate among most White, middle-class people (the most frequent users of mock Spanish), mock Spanish serves as a covert form of racism that often goes unnoticed and unquestioned. How do you think that Hill's notion of covert racism through mock Spanish applies to the late 1990's Ebonics debates? Was the public and media outcry against the recognition of Ebonics as a valid dialect of English a form of covert racism?

Week 9 (7/31-8/4)

Watson-Grego advocates recognizing HCE as an equally viable dialect in the Hawaiian public school system rather than forcing every student to learn Standard English thereby denying their ethnic/regional identities. She also begins the article by citing alarming statistics regarding Hawaiian public school standardized test scores and overall poor academic performance as compared with the rest of the nation. Many scholars have argued that standardized tests (such as the SAT and ACT) are racially and economically biased, with middle and upper middle class white students performing consistently better than lower class and minority students. Obviously, students whose first language is a "non-standard" dialect of English (such as AAE or HCE) will have a more difficult time with standardized exams that are written by and for speakers of Standard English. What do you think are some possible and realistic solutions to this dilemma?