Teaching

I am currently teaching…


Previously, I’ve taught…



The rest of this page serves as a repository for teaching materials and workshops I have prepared.


Courses

Phonetics and Phonology

I taught this course Fall 2017 and Spring 2019 at UGA. I am teaching a very similar course at BYU with a different title (“Sounds of Language”). Here is a syllabus from UGA.

Praat Tutorial—For homework, I often assign students mini-projects that involve the use of Praat. This assignment serves as a useful tutorial to downloading and running Praat for the first time. In it, I give detailed instructions on how to make and transcribe a sentence.

Features Chart—When I was preparing to teach features for the first time, I found it hard to keep track of all of them so I started making a chart. It turned out to be pretty useful and I thought my students might like it too. It’s meant to act as reference rather than instruction, so you’ll still have to read through the relevant chapters to understand everything. It’s a lot of information to cram into a single page, so it’s still a work in progress to make it look better. It’s sort of one of those things that makes sense to the person who made it and no one else, so you’re milage may vary. I should have an accompanying “How to use this chart” guide. Maybe next time.

English Phonetics and Phonology

I taught this Winter 2022 and Winter 2023. It’s similar to the Phonetics and Phonology course I taught already, but it cuts out most non-English material and goes into more depth into English. Here is a syllabus.

Applied Phonetics

I am currently in the process of completely overhauling my “English Phonetics and Phonology” course and turning it into an “Applied Phonetics” course. This is in response to the department changing the English Language major to Applied English Linguistics a year or so ago. The idea is to teach about five weeks of basic phonetics and phonology concepts, then for the rest of the semester we’ll spend a week on a different “applied” area and see how phonetics can help. The topics include, L1 acquisition, aging, disorders and pathology, technology and speech recognition, forensic phonetics, SLA, regional and social accents, phonetics in the media, and applications in business. We’ll see how that goes!

Introduction to Sociolinguistics

I taught this undergraduate version of sociolinguistics in Winter 2021. You can look through the syllabus here. We followed Allan Bell’s The Guidebook to Sociolinguistics for the most part, though I threw in some additional topics towards the end.

Sociolinguistics

I taught this course in Winter 2021, Fall 2021, and Fall 2022. This is the graduate-level version of the Introduction to Sociolinguistics course above (so it’s still introductory course) and is similar to the undergraduate version except we take one day a week to read and discuss articles. Here is my most recent syllabus.

Special Topics: African American English

I taught this course Spring of 2023 under the auspices of the senior capstone course, as well as as a linguistics elective, in the linguistics department. (So, technically it was cross-listed as LING 495R: Senior Capstone, ELING 495R: The Senior Course, LING 421R: Studies in Linguistics, and ELING 421R: Studies in Language or Editing).

The capstone courses in my deaprtment are designed to be open-ended and end up being special topics courses that cover a wide range of subfields in linguistics. Most of the faculty who had been teaching these capstone courses though had recently retired, so we have been in dire need for new courses to put into the rotation. I had wanted to teaching something about language ideology/discrimination/attitudes but I was asked to do something to do with American English; we settled on African American English, which I think was a nice compromise.

So, with the help and input from many friends and colleagues, I designed and prepped the course from scratch, using Lisa Green’s African American English as my main textbook. I went into the course knowing some things here and there about AAE from just being exposed to the literature on it in sociolinguistics, and it turned out to be a very challenging but richly rewarding course for me. Here is the syllabus.

Special Topics: Sociolinguistic Fieldwork

This is a special topics course that I taught with Lisa Johnson in Winter 2023. We used Natalie Schilling’s textbook of the same name as our guide and did a Utah County–based implementation of similar courses taught in other universities. (Our “fieldsite” that we chose was the city of Lehi.) The course involved going out to the field to conduct sociolinguistic interviews. You can see a syllabus here.

Introduction to Varieties of English

I’ve taught this course four times so far. In Summer 2020, it was completely online and had a focus on the British Isles to make up for the study abroad to the UK and Ireland that was cancelled due to covid. In Fall 2020, Fall 2021, and Fall 2022 we covered around 30 varieties of English in three broad units: North America, the British Isles, and everywhere else. Here is my syllabus from Fall 2022.

Linguistics Tools 1

I taught this course in Fall 2020 and Fall 2021. It covers how to conduct a linguistics study and covers software like Zotero, Word, Excel, Praat, AntConc, Qualtrics, and Jamovi with an introduction to statistics scattered throughout. Here is a syllabus from when I taught it in Fall 2021.

Special Topics: Linguistic Data Analysis

This is a special topics course that I taught with Earl Brown in Fall 2022. We be built upon the version of the course he taught in Winter 2020. Here is the syllabus we started off with (though it did change quite a bit in the end).

Research Design in Linguistics

I team-taught this course in Winter 2021 with Dan Dewey and by myself Winter 2022 and I’m now teaching it Winter 2024. Students end the semester with a prospectus for their MA thesis and walk away with some introductory statistics. Here is my most recent syllabus.




Workshops

LaTeX Workshops

Caleb Crumley, Jonathan Crum, and I led a series of three workshops on LaTeX as a way to introduce the new UGA Dissertation LaTeX template. I discussed basic LaTeX skills, Caleb showed how to use the template, and Jonathan illustrated more advanced topics. This series got the stamp of approval from the UGA Graduate School and had over 100 registered attendees.

Praat Scripting Workshops

Lisa Lipani and I led three workshops on Praat and Praat scripting. We discussed the basics of the Praat interface, how to code basic things, and then did one devoted to automatic extraction of formant measurements.

Data Visualization Workshops

In a suite of five workshops, I discussed data visualization. Three of them were focused on ggplot2 (see the R workshops) but two were platform-independent and discussed the use of color and Edward Tufte’s principles of data visualization. Though they’re outside my discipline, I really enjoyed these workshops.

R Workshops

I have led more than a dozen workshops on R on a variety of topics. In addition to just an intro to R, I’ve talked about the tidyverse, RMarkdown, and Shiny. I’ve done a handful just on ggplot2, and I have handouts ready for more detailed workshops on customizing plots in ggplot2 for future workshops.

Professionalization (“Brand Yourself”) Workshops

In this workshops, I discuss ways to boost your online presence as an academic. I’ve given this workshop several times over the past few years and it has evolved quite a bit based on my own experiences. The gist: make a website and possibly also get active on Twitter.

Academic Poster Workshop

I gave a brief—and very opinionated—workshop on how to make an academic poster. I discuss overall design and layout, nit-picky things like font sizes and color, and content.

Excel Workshop

I once gave a workshop on Excel. It was a while ago.