122234 AR Linguistics Course (interactive) (2016W)

The teaching context you are about to enter (i.e. Austrian secondary education) is characterized by a diverse student body. This includes factors such as gender and social background, but more recently also an increasingly diverse mix of home languages. Your future students will need to navigate a society that is linguistically and culturally complex, and school should prepare them to meet the challenges that necessarily arise as a result. All these factors should be taken account of in teaching, particularly language teaching. This raises questions such as how to avoid gender-, class-, or first language bias, but also concerns issues like how the global lingua-franca role of English ought to be reflected in contemporary approaches to ELT. In this course, we will ask what various strands of linguistics (socio-, applied, corpus,...) might have to contribute to an informed discussion of these matters, and which strategies teachers can use to address the challenges, and harness the potential, which is inherent in social diversity.