Spring 2026 – German Department Courses in Linguistics

Professor Joe Cunningham
Course Schedule: MW 2:00-3:15 pm

As computer-based technologies have taken on an increasingly central role in foreign language instruction, Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is no longer a specialty area. Accordingly, this course serves as an introduction to the broader field of CALL and various techno-pedagogical applications that fall under this umbrella. Students will understand the growth of CALL in second language (L2) instruction, examine the pedagogical rationale for utilizing CALL, evaluate various applications for L2 instruction, and engage with ethical issues relevant to learning and teaching with technology. In addition to critical examination of language learning technologies, students will develop their own abilities to utilize and apply technologies relevant to L2 instruction. Students will demonstrate course learning outcomes through three major assignments:

1. Research brief: Students will select, read and summarize one article/chapter from a scholarly publication (i.e., journal or edited volume). These text-based summaries should also address the articles’ contributions to the growth of CALL as a field of scholarship.
2. Technology review: Students will select and evaluate one particular technology or application that can be used to foster language development. The technology reviews will be delivered using a non-text-based multimedia platform (e.g., video, podcast, etc.).
3. Teaching unit: In the context of a particular L2 curriculum, students will design a teaching unit that incorporates CALL in an integral way.

In all cases, the course will emphasize the primacy of sound pedagogy when using CALL for L2 instruction.

Professor Marianna Ryshina-Pankova
Course Schedule: MW 12:30-1:45 pm

Linguists, language educators and researchers of literature and culture conduct discourse analysis for a variety of purposes: to capture writing and literacy development, to characterize teacher-student classroom interaction, to describe social practices at various institutions, or to reveal aspects of an author’s style. This course introduces students to the socioculturally-oriented analysis of language using Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as an approach that enables discourse analysts to systematically account for the connections between grammar, discourse, and social activity no matter what their research data are: learner written texts, spoken conversations, institutional documents, or literary discourse. The course will cover the fundamental conceptual and methodological tools the SFL approach makes available for such an analysis.

The course will start with the overarching assumptions about the SFL model of language as social semiotic and then explore its specific theoretical constructs, such as genre, register, metafunctions, and the grammatical systems that are used to encode them. Three fundamental questions will underlie our exploration: How is language structured for use? What choices do language users make? How do these choices function in various contexts of use? Throughout the course, participants will be discussing studies that demonstrate how the analytical constructs and tools can be applied to the analysis of language data in various contexts. We will examine studies of oral and written texts in diverse registers and genres, aspects of second language acquisition at various educational and performance levels, second/foreign language pedagogy, curriculum development, teacher education, and assessment. Those interested in literary texts will discover how the approach can shed new light on the study of literature as a phenomenon of languaging in a particular way.