Language, Community, and Politics
SBHS – January 31, 2013
Friday Lesson Plan
Goals:
· To review communities of practices (COP) by focusing on those that the students belong to
· To get to know our students and for them to better get to know us.
· To become familiar with IPA
Introduce Anna
Zu: Create a concept map of communities of practice and how slang fits as a component within it.
(5 minutes)
Mentors: The mentors will be asked to share what their communities of practice were in high school and how those changed when they went to college. What new communities or practice do they belong to now? How do they straddle these communities when they go back home? (5 minutes)
Students will be instructed to
Brainstorm independently by writing in their journal about the communities of practices they belong to (3 minutes). Students will then break up into groups of 4 and discuss the following (10 minutes):
· What communities of practices that they belong too?
· What are repertoires (language, dress, behavior, actions, etc.) that make up this a community of practice?
· Are there any COP that they left? Why so?
· How do they straddle these COP?
o What role does language play in straddling these COP? (style shifting = when they switch dialects, language, slang, jargon, to communicate within changing COP)
o Do any of them clash?
o Can you be this and/or that?
o How do they balance these out?
o Where do they struggle?
o Succeed?
How does identity play a role (10 minutes)
o How does your identity play a role within these communities of practices?
o Are there any of these COP that you identify (claim identity) more strongly with?
o Are there COP that you identify with but that do not identify you as part of it?
o Are there some COP that identify you (attribute identity) as part of their community but you do not see yourself as part of it?
o Do you borrow elements (language, clothing style, behaviors) of various COP to straddle your own?
Bring the discussion back to the group:
Mentors: Write down the communities of practice on one half of the board (2-3 minutes)
o Students will be asked to shout out these COP
After the COP are written down on one half of the board… (5 minutes)
o Students will be ask to shout out slang terms associated with their communities of practice… or even communities that they are not apart of but words that they recognize as slang (e.g., ratchet is not a part of my repertoire but I know it is slang).
Steven will present on the origins of slang in hip-hop & Rap. (5 minutes)
Summarizing course concepts and express how these are fundamental to their slang project. They will be studying slang within a COP of their choice (3 minutes)
Students will asked to spend a few minutes writing a definition for communities of practices – they will then turn these in – we will collect these and then review particularly focusing on their questions regarding college so we can problematize how we will address these questions throughout the class. (3 minutes)
Transition to IPA Part of Lesson
What does a slang dictionary need? (5 min)
· Part of our research and projects for this class will be to create a slang dictionary of the slang words you all know and will record, just like the words you have thought of for this activity today.
· Today we are going to start thinking about what our slang dictionary entries need – what we need to understand slang words.
· Let’s look at an example (Anna – choose a slang word from the board that they have suggested.)
· Go over the parts of this word needed in the slang dictionary (the word, the part of speech, the definition).
· Focus on the part in parentheses – what is this supposed to show us? (pronunciation)
o how accurate is this representation? how else might we spell what he says? (he says [tɹɛl])
· so there seems to be a problem here for writing down how things are said – who might use these pronunciations?
ACTIVITY: INTRODUCING THE IPA (10-15 min)
Advance to slide 4. For the first set of words, ask students the difference between the underlined sounds.
· How do we know how to pronounce each one? (we have to memorize them).
· Any other examples like these?
· What’s wrong with this as a spelling system?
Ask the students how the second set of words is different from the first.
· Does anyone pronounce some of the words in each line differently?
· Does anyone pronounce all of them the same?
· Any other examples like these?
· What’s wrong with this as a spelling system?
English spelling is a nightmare. Spanish spelling is actually pretty good, but no language has a perfect spelling system.
The ideal spelling system would have one symbol per sound and one sound per symbol.
· That’s what the phonetic alphabet does.
· It can also write any language in the world.
· We’ll mostly focus on how to write English and Spanish. Let us know if you want to know about symbols for sounds in other languages.
Give the students Handout 1.4 and model each sound, then have them make it.
· Write the weird ones on the board so they see how to make the shape.
· Tell them that if they don’t pronounce the words quite the way the handout says, they should write what they normally say, not what the handout says.
· Ask for their own pronunciations or volunteer your own different pronunciations so they see that variation is okay.
ACTIVITY: PRACTICING THE IPA (10-15 min)
· Have the students write their names (both first and last) in the IPA.
· Once they have a draft, they should get an instructor to check their work and help them with any errors (don’t just tell them the answer, guide them to it).
· Have the first fifteen students who have their name transcribed write it on the board in IPA in square brackets.
· Go through each name and have the class sound out what each name is. This can be continued in the next lesson if there is not enough time.