- The Executive Committee of the LSA will be holding its Spring meeting on 9-10 May, 2008, in Washington, DC. For further information, contact Katha Kissman.
- Nominations for the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award are due 1 June, 2008.
- Nominations for the LSA's "Linguistics, Language and the Public" Award will be accepted until 1 June, 2008.
Undergraduate Program Advisory
2008
Background
Established in 1997.
Responsibilities
The Undergraduate Program Advisory Committee facilitates the establishment and expansion of undergraduate programs in linguistics at universities, colleges, and community colleges, through a three-pronged effort involving: (a) promoting, supporting, and assessing efforts for the creation of linguistic programs with an undergraduate focus; (b) supporting and assessing efforts to make undergraduate linguistics courses a necessary part of general education curricula and a common elective choice for undergraduates; and (c) developing strategies for bringing the value of linguistic studies to the attention of undergraduates. It coordinates its work with other Society efforts such as Language, the Program Committee, the Language in the School Curriculum Committee, and Linguistic Institutes.
This effort should yield materials that could be used as a basis for discussion and negotiation with university or college administrators, including curriculum plans, tools for projecting enrollments, tools for financial analysis, and strategic advice from successful undergraduate linguistics programs. It should involve making the existence of these resources known to linguists, especially those at institutions which do not yet have well-established undergraduate linguistics programs, a plan for communicating the urgency of this issue to academic linguists throughout the US, and an assessment of the usefulness and feasibility of the LSA's continuing to provide such assistance and guidance.
Selected Projects and Activities
- Annual Meeting Exhibit: Introductory Linguistics Materials (in Publishers' Exhibit) - 1998
- Annual Meeting Symposium: Bridging the Gap: Introductory Linguistics and the Nonmajor (organized by Cari Spring) - 1998
- Annual Meeting Symposium: Building More and Larger Undergraduate Programs in Linguistics: How To Do It and Why (organized by Wayne Cowart) - 1999
- Annual Meeting Symposium: Linguistics and Related Disciplines in the Undergraduate Curriculum (organized by Michael Flynn) - 2000
- The Successful Introductory Course: Bridging the Gap for the Nonmajor (Language 76.1) - 2000
- Annual Meeting Symposium: What Every Educated Person Should Know About Language and Why (organized by Rebecca Wheeler) - 2001
Courses & Curriculum
Following are the locations of the syllabi for a number of introductory courses. Links to others are solicited.
Indiana University
University of Arizona
The links below are to interdepartmental linguistics programs. These may offer some help to linguists or institutions interested in building a linguistics program, in the absence of a full-blown linguistics department. Links to others are solicited.
Membership
Originally six members, including a member of the Executive Committee and a member of the Language in the School Curriculum Committee. In 1999, the membership was expanded to eight members.
Committee Members (all terms run through the end of the year in parentheses)
Kirk Hazen, Co-chair, West Virginia University (2008)
Judith Parker, Co-chair, University of Mary Washington (2009)
Gulsat Aygen, Northern Illinois University (2010)
Ed Finnegan, USC (2010)
Kazuko Hiramatsu, University of Michigan-Flint (2009)
Hans H. Hock, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign (2008)
Jeri Jaeger, State University of New York at Buffalo (2010)
Saundra Wright, California State University-Fresno (2008)
