The LSA is offering the following minicourses on Sunday, January 5.  You may register for a maximum of ONE minicourse by clicking on the button below it.

Digitizing your Analog Course: A mini-course for instructors interested in designing online linguistics courses

Sunday, January 5, 9:00 AM - 3:00 PM (with an hour-long lunch break)

Room:  Quarterdeck C

Instructors: Karen Adams (Arizona State University); David Bowie (University of Alaska); Lynn Burley (University of Central Arkansas); Gaillynn Clements (Duke University); Miranda McCarvel (Smith College); Lynn Santelmann (Portland State University)

Linguistics has traditionally been taught in the classroom, with students and the professor both present for synchronous classes. However, changes in technology, enrollment levels, student body characteristics, and administrative priorities have led to a shift from in-classroom to online education for all departments and programs. In addition, the number of students enrolled in online courses has grown. This has led to greater pressure on linguistics instructors to teach and design online courses, often without adequate instruction or support on how to create these courses.

This six-hour workshop will provide instructors with an overview of crafting online courses, specifically for linguistics, including the advantages and disadvantages of teaching online; accessibility; best practices; various course management systems; and how to address the needs of different student populations. In addition, the course will provide instructors with hands-on tutorials on how to transform portions of their current classroom-based course into an online course.

Experimental methods for linguists: a basic introduction

CANCELLED:  Please contact lsa@lsadc.org for refunds. 

Introduction to the sociophonetics of intonation

Sunday, January 5: 12:30 PM - 5:30 PM, with a one-hour break from 2:30 - 3:30 PM

Room: Pelican

Instructor: Paul E. Reed (University of Alabama)

Intonation is a feature that is well-suited to be investigated from a sociophonetic viewpoint, as improvements in access to acoustic software and recording hardware permit more researchers to acquire and analyze intonational data. Recent research has also identified how speakers use intonational phenomena to express various social factors, such as race, ethnicity, and region.  Thus, more research, more questions, and more researchers interested in and comfortable with

intonational phenomena are needed. However, some researchers feel ill-prepared to approach intonational questions as most introductory phonetics courses focus more on vowels and consonants.

The goal of this mini-course is to provide a general background in techniques to allow researchers to better understand intonation, how to do some basic intonational transcription, and how to collect intonational data that permits more nuanced research questions to evaluate social variation in intonation.

The first part of the course will present an overview of intonation and some best practices for recording, transcription, and analysis. The second part of the course will present an overview of several common sociophonetic measures

of intonational phenomena. The course will require that participants bring a laptop with Praat (www.praat.org) downloaded. Practice data sets will be provided, although participants are encouraged to bring their own data if desired. No previous knowledge of intonation is  required, although familiarity with basic acoustics and general phonetics will be beneficial.

Mobile Apps for Endangered Language Revitalization and Documentation

Sunday, January 5:  12:30 PM - 5:30 PM

Room: Port

Instructor: Khalil Iskarous, (University of Southern California)

Many communities would like their endangered languages and cultures to continue through their youngest speakers, but even when care-takers speak their endangered languages to a child, most of the tools of entertainment and education are in the culturally-dominant language. The goal of this minicourse is to teach linguists to develop mobile apps with narrated animations and audio- based video games, so that language input is available in the endangered language beyond care- taker and community input. Mobile apps are the focus, since smart phones are becoming near- universal tools of communication, available to many people who do not have laptops or desktops.

The minicourse will introduce, from scratch, Flutter, a freely available framework for cross-platform (Android and iOS), app-development. This framework allows the user to design apps with very high complexity. The working of the system will be illustrated using the gamigami app under development to help the revitalization of the Fassa Ladin Language, spoken in Northern Italy.

No knowledge of programming will be assumed. The framework will be introduced abstractly using its grammatic structure (as it is a language after all), then it will be introduced as a concrete programming by creation of extremely simple apps, followed by gradually more complex ones. There will also be a discussion of how to build apps for documenting endangered languages in communities where speakers can be encouraged to download an app, and record answers to questions, or provide spoken descriptions of pictures or animations. Those interested in this course should register early, as the instructor will help them setup and install the system on their laptops via Skype before the session, since that can be a lengthy process.