Alexandria Hanson
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
First-year students often enter introductory writing courses with a wide range of language experiences and backgrounds. To develop critical language awareness, as Shawna Shapiro writes, it is important to help students “recognize the variation within their own linguistic repertoir—no matter how many languages or language varieties they use” (63). Research has shown that such recognition “is an important starting point for shifting negative attitudes towards the languaging of others” (63). This assignment is intended to help students make this critical shift. The communication guide asks students to consider a familiar space where communication breakdown has the potential to occur and create a guide focused on language usage for outsiders of the community to successfully enter that space. Students must choose a language community that they consider themselves an expert in, such as language used with friends, family, or other contexts. In addition to creating a guide, students present a mini-lesson to the class, where they teach something about the language in their community. This combination of a guide and the mini-lesson facilitates a sense of community within the classroom, validates an area of expertise students bring to college, and recognizes the value of linguistic diversity. Such community building, validation, and recognition is especially valuable for first-year students transitioning to college. Within the communication guide unit, students engage with a variety of texts that help them understand ideas around linguistic variety, discrimination, and ideology such as: “Talk American” from Code Switch, “What Makes a Language…a Language?” from TED X, “There is One Correct Way of Writing and Speaking” from Bad Ideas about Writing by Anjali Pattanavak, “Why does everyone on TikTok use the same weird voice?” by Alice Hall, “How did words like periodt, GYAT, cap and drip come to be? All about the Black history of slang” by Alex Portée, “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3” by Stanley Fish, “Should Writers Use They Own English?” by Vershawn Ashanti Young, “What’s Anti-Blackness Got to do Wit It?” by April Baker-Bell from Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, “The Rise and Fall of ZuckTalk” by John Herrman, and “From Upspeak to Vocal Fry: Why are we ‘policing’ young women’s voices?” from Fresh Air. More information about these texts can be found in Further Reading below. Previous students have shared that they think this assignment works best early in the semester, as it allows them to get to know one another.