More Linguistics for 10-Year-Olds
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Abstract
This paper is a short report on a linguistics class that I taught in College for Kids at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in July 1988. The children in the class were eight children who had just finished fifth grade; they were children who were identified as gifted. The class lasted for about two hours on three consecutive mornings. The class took place on campus and the children were accompanied by their teacher, Fred Bartling. The day after the course was over I made notes about what we had done. This report is based on my notes and my memory. I might say at the outset that I started off on the first day with the misguided idea that 10-year-olds could be given a watered-down version of the sort of linguistics class that goes down well with undergraduates (it might have helped if I had read Fabb (1985) before the class). My experience on the first day of trying to interest the children in the difference between particles and prepositions ('John looked up the road'; 'John looked up the number') made it clear that the facts had at least to be presented in a different way, and a lot of my time in the next day or so was spent trying to work out linguistic activities and games that 10-year-olds would enjoy. What follows is a list of things that seemed to work (and some that didn't), organized according to topic (syntax, morphology, phonetics and phonology, and language acquisition).
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