Digital Teaching for Linguistics Digital Teaching for Linguistics re-imagines the teaching of linguistics in a digital environment. It provides both an introduction to digital pedagogy and a discussion of technologically driven teaching practices that could be applied to any field of study. Drawing on the authors’ extensive experience of successful delivery of web- based instruction and assessment, this book: • provides extended analysis and discussion of the best practices for teaching in an online and blended context; • features examples and case studies based on current research and teaching practice; • proposes new methods of teaching and assessment in line with innovations in educational technology. This book is essential reading for educators in the areas of linguistics, English language, and education seeking guidance and advice on how to design or adapt their teaching for a digital world. Rebecca Gregory, Jessica Norledge, Peter Stockwell, and Paweł Szudarski are academic staff in the School of English at the University of Nottingham. They are part of a team whose award-winning suite of online masters courses in ‘Applied English’ draws on two decades of experience and practice, and has received international recognition. Digital Teaching for Linguistics Rebecca Gregory, Jessica Norledge, Peter Stockwell, and Paweł Szudarski Cover image: © Getty Images First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Rebecca Gregory, Jessica Norledge, Peter Stockwell, Paweł Szudarski The right of Rebecca Gregory, Jessica Norledge, Peter Stockwell, Paweł Szudarski to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gregory, Rebecca, author. | Norledge, Jessica, author. | Stockwell, Peter, author. | Szudarski, Paweł, author. Title: Digital teaching for linguistics / Rebecca Gregory, Jessica Norledge, Peter Stockwell, and Paweł Szudarski Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021043642 (print) | LCCN 2021043643 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032058504 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781032058498 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781003199496 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Linguistics—Computer-assisted instruction. | Language and languages—Computer-assisted instruction. | Linguistics—Web-based instruction. | Linguistics—Study and teaching—Technological innovations. Classification: LCC P53.28 .G73 2022 (print) | LCC P53.28 (ebook) | DDC 410.78/5--dc23/eng/20211027 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043642 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043643 ISBN: 978-1-032-05850-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05849-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19949-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003199496 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Access the Support Material: www.routledge.com/9781032058504 Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: digital teaching for linguistics 1 PART I Teaching linguistics online 11 1 Innovations in digital pedagogy 13 2 Developing online and blended linguistics communities 38 3 The online linguistics tutor 60 PART II Active and interactive teaching in linguistics 81 4 Facilitating the linguistics seminar online 83 5 Technology, techniques, teaching 104 6 Empirical research and online linguistic practice 125 PART III Reconceptualising assessment for linguistics 143 7 Peer-to-peer assessment and collaboration 145 8 Providing formative feedback online 163 9 Portfolio assessment 185 Index 207 Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the Applied English team at the University of Nottingham, particularly Helena Bacon, Jo Guy, Carina Hart, Claire Humphries, Emma Hutson, Christopher Woolston, and all our colleagues in the School of English. Thanks to the University’s PGCHE team, and especially Denise Sweeney. The online masters project was enabled by a Strategic Development Fund award from the University’s Planning, Performance and Strategic Change unit. We would also like to thank all of the students from across the world who have enrolled on our distance learning courses since 1998, from whom we have learned so much. Introduction Digital teaching for linguistics Digital and analogue pedagogies The ‘digital’ is often used – not as a modifier but as a noun – to refer sweepingly within education to the range of tools, techniques, course types, classroom set- tings, curriculum design and student-teacher interactions that are characterised by or based on electronic storage, mediation or communication. The shift from the manual typewriter to the word processor on a computer; the ability to search library catalogues on-screen from a different city; the replacement of the sheaf of lecture notes with an electronic file of slides projected on a screen above the lec- tern; being able to conduct a seminar on-screen with multiple cameras on students scattered in different locations; clicking through to a posted online link to a docu- ment that everyone can discuss in real time – all of these are manifestations of ‘the digital’. They all happened over the course of the last forty years. The shift is not simply a material one away from analogue paper, blackboard, physical proxim- ity and resources limited to the here-and-now; the shift is more fundamental than that. The ‘digital’ has brought a change in perception, a change in identities of teacher and student, and ‘the digital’ requires a different mind-set and a different set of pedagogies. This book considers what these ‘digital pedagogies’ might be and what they entail. We use ‘digital’ as a modifier because it allows us to be more precise about the different aspects of storage, mediation and communication. Digital storage refers to the means by which we can now keep huge stores of information in electronic form on computer databases. We have connected more material than in all the world’s libraries, made it machine-readable and mostly accessible from around 12 billion devices. Digital mediation refers to the ways in which individu- als are connected to and interact with all of that stored material: how it is filtered, selected, curated, and turned from data into information or from information into knowledge. Digital communication refers to the means by which we can use electronic devices to talk to each other, discuss matters, argue and critique ideas, explain and refute arguments. Of course, storage (libraries, printouts), mediation (classrooms, curricula) and communication (discussion, essays) all existed previ- ously, but the rendering of all of these into digitised forms has transformed them. DOI: 10.4324/9781003199496-1 2 Introduction Digitisation of storage has expanded what is available and how quickly and readily it can be found. Digitisation of mediation has increased the range of what is possible in a course or an educational setting. Digitisation of communication has allowed students and teachers to be displaced from each other in space and time and yet still be able to exchange ideas in much greater and diverse ways. All of this variety, altered by digitisation, means that when it comes to thinking about what teaching now is, we need to think in the plural about digital pedagogies, rather than a single method or philosophy or ethos. There are many ways in which the move from analogue forms of knowledge, teaching and reflection has funda- mental implications for each of those domains. Around the expansion of what ‘the digital’ means today, many other terms circle and are sometimes used interchangeably. Not everything digital is online, mean- ing networked on a different device other than the one you are currently working on. The class with PowerPoint slides projecting text is digital but not online. Not all digital teaching is remote or by distance. On-campus classes with students physically attending the classroom might well still be using digital resources, organised by a digitised timetable, using a library catalogue on-screen to find a physical or virtual book. Not everything digital is virtual, which is often nega- tively contrasted with the physical or real. The library catalogue is not a virtual representation of a catalogue: it is the thing itself. A digitised article is not a virtual version of a physical article – they are both just articles in different forms. Many terms work in both the digital and analogue domains. We are co-present whether we are in a physical room together or are side-by-side on-screen or as avatars in a game world. We are face-to-face in those settings too, though what our faces look like might be more a matter of choice in the latter than the former instance. A student in a video call in a seminar is still attending. A classroom is accessible if it is easily entered by everyone, regardless of physical capacity; course materials are accessible if they have changeable fonts, closed captions, switchable background and contrast colours, alt-tags on images to enable screen- readers, and are not tied to any single proprietary platform or device. Teaching can be both synchronous or asynchronous regardless of whether it is in a digital or analogue setting. Students can collaborate and do groupwork whether they are physically or remotely present. A portfolio of work, possibly for assessment, can be collected on a proprietary platform as a set of files with a front-facing website, or it can be a set of papers in a big black leather binder. It is also not the case that digital pedagogies and analogue pedagogies are mutually exclusive. Hybrid or blended teaching is probably the most typical form of classroom pedagogy today: students might access material online for discus- sion on-site; they might use digitised archives and libraries to write an essay using citation and annotation software, but the essay itself might end up looking very traditional in form, and might even be printed out on paper. A tutor might grade the essay on-screen but could add marginal annotations either digitally or with an actual pen in the actual paper margin. Introduction 3 Some of these changes over the last few decades might look simply like digital versions of analogue objects and practices. There is, of course, a design motiva- tion that renders the new version in a familiar form so that it is quickly usable. This so-called skeuomorphic design has been particularly common in the design principles of digitised educational material, where a pedagogical principle sug- gests that teaching new concepts while at the same time mediating those con- cepts through a new medium requires too much cognitive overload from students. A typical online course might still have lectures, seminars, tutorials, a discussion area, handouts, a textbook, named tutors with pictures, named students, student records, a transcript, a submission box for an essay, a coversheet, and a notice- board – and yet, almost every single word in this sentence so far might well have been put in ‘scare quotes’ because none of them are actually ‘real’. Even though a user might connect the digital and actual referents of all of these concepts, the fact is that they are fundamentally different as phenomena, and cru- cially that means that our relationship with them and our experience of them is also different in really quite fundamental ways. We also need to recognise that not all students (nor teachers) are the same, and their attitude and demeanour towards digi- tal objects can also vary enormously. The shift in education into the digital sphere brings very explicitly home to us the diversity of students, both in terms of their cultural experience of the digital world, but also because the reach of the teacher and the classroom has been expanded simply to encompass many more, and there- fore many different people. A teacher who relies on a single philosophy or ethos of teaching, a single method, a single pedagogy, in other words, is likely to be neither comfortable nor effective in this digital domain. This is why we need to think about the varied pedagogies that we bring to our teaching. And this is why this book speaks about many different digital pedagogies, in terms both of method and ethos. Linguistics as focus and case-study A book like this stands at a particular moment. It is either a physical book or a dig- itised one that you have in front of you, but either way it is fixed as a text and the text is fixed in time. Here, it is the start of the third decade of the twenty-first cen- tury. We are very conscious that many of the terms and ideas contained here will quite soon appear as quaint to you in the future as we now look back at phrases like ‘e-knowledge’, the ‘information superhighway’, and the ‘world-wide web’, or talk about ‘smartphones’ as if there are any other type, or wonder how books could really be published with a ‘CD-ROM’ slipped into a plastic case at the back. We are also aware that we will refer to current software brands, companies and sys- tems that might soon have the same flavour for you as we regard ‘Yahoo’, ‘Ask Jeeves’, ‘dial-up’, ‘Netscape’, ‘floppy discs’, ‘Compuserve’ or ‘Napster’. More pertinently for our historical situation, we are writing this book towards what we hope will be the end of a global virus pandemic. During this time, the digital literacies of university teachers have been accelerated forwards by a factor