Languages of the World: An Enrichment Unit
This site is designed to benefit students of foreign languages at the high school or college level. Middle school students may benefit from some of the activities as well, although they may find several of them difficult. Our goal is to provide language instructors with a set of activities that add depth to the study of language, put languages in context, promote diversity awareness, and touch upon major issues in linguistics and language learning.We designed the activities as very short, task-oriented exercises that should take no longer than ten minutes to complete. For each exercise, we envision a class that is divided into groups. Each group is assigned a task, upon the completion of which students report to the whole class on what they had accomplished or learned. Occasionally, we provide links to computer exercises for additional practice should the teacher desire to use them.
While the site touches upon the typical issues covered in introductory linguistic courses, it is intentionally constructed as a loose series of teasers that provoke thought on different aspects of language. Thus, our unit on scripts, for example, takes the angle of script reform as an illustration of the interplay between language and social change, and does not attempt to provide a comprehensive discussion of the evolution of writing. Our hope is that the activities intrigue the students enough to create broader interest in the topics we present.
The various activities we provide here are independent of one another, and can be used as warm-ups, routine breakers, or just fun activities that require no particular context or preparation. Our assumption in designing the unit as a whole is that its completion in the course of a semester or a year can enrich any foreign-language curriculum and benefit the learners by anchoring their experience in a wider context.
For each activity we provide a number of student handouts ranked by the difficulty of the activity [simple (*), challenging(**), difficult(***)]. We include leading questions and suggestions for discussion topics that teachers might want to explore with their students, and a list of additional resources relevant to the topic. Where appropriate, we also provide a page with common terminology associated with the topic. The student handouts are designed to print on one page, and can be easily reproduced.
Activities
