An Apparent Time Study of Rhoticity among Bostonians (LX 346/646, Spring 2020)
Channel: BU Linguistics Public Relations
Date: 2020-07-23

In this video, Prof. Danny Erker narrates the findings of the class research project in his Language Variation and Change course (CAS LX 346 / GRS LX 646): "An Apparent Time Study of Rhoticity among Bostonians".

The goal of this course, part of BU's Hub general education curriculum, is to explore how languages change across time and in social space. To address the pedagogical challenge of teaching simultaneously to undergraduate and graduate students, Prof. Erker explained, "I've tried to take advantage of the Hub's ability to bring students with a diverse set of interests into my courses and then focus the courses around collaborative research projects."

In Spring 2020, students in the course, which carries Hub units in 'Social Inquiry I' and 'Teamwork/Collaboration', worked in teams to collectively research whether some Bostonians were losing some of their characteristic ways of speaking, such as non-rhoticity ("r-dropping") in certain contexts. "Collaborative research projects scale really nicely when you have undergraduate students who have a broad range of interests, and then master's students who have very specific interests, and then PhD students who have professional-level academic interests," observed Prof. Erker. 

Collaborating on Slack and Zoom, student groups created presentations that analyzed their respective data sets, and Prof. Erker later synthesized those presentations into this video that tells the story of the class's research. "This approach has allowed me to give students tremendous agency and ownership over the direction of the course," Prof. Erker said. "It's been effective pedagogically, and students seem to really like it."