Outreach at Maryland
Engaging with non-academic audiences reflects a core value of the Language Science Center. Through outreach, we strive to inform the local community about language science in a way that is fun, approachable, and relevant to their daily lives.
We encourage all students and faculty affiliated with LSC to take part in outreach activities. Some of our regular outreach activities include our partnership with the student-led linguistics club at Montgomery-Blair High School, hosting early rounds of the NACLO competition, research internships for high school students, attending science fairs at local elementary schools, Maryland Day, regional and national science and engineering festivals, and hosting high school campus visits.
Outreach Events
Language science fields are often ‘discovery majors’, meaning that most students do not discover them until college, and we hope to increase awareness of the discipline through outreach to younger students. Our observations coupled with short survey responses from elementary school students suggest that virtual outreach maintains many of these benefits while also allowing us to reach students who are not located near a university with a language science outreach programme.
Kathleen Oppenheimer, Lauren Salig, Craig Thorburn, and Erika Exton on benefits of their outreach
Why Should I Participate?
Through outreach, we encourage the wider community to think critically about language science and its applications. It empowers students to explore new academic opportunities and career paths, and parents to learn about their children's language development. Educating the broader community about dialects, multilingualism, and language-related biases can positively impact inclusivity, decrease language-related bias, and shape literacy policy.
Outreach also helps scientists practice communication skills relevant to research. If you can communicate your research and excite a middle schooler, you can do it with colleagues across departments!
FAQ
How Do I Plan an Outreach Event?
Well-planned outreach goes beyond planning a simple activity. To create an engaging activity, it is important to leverage your strengths. Not sure what your strengths are? Ask yourself some of the following questions:
- What’s the one thing you wish most people knew about language or your specific research area?
- What do you consider the most fun part of your research?
- How is your research unique?
- What gets your peers excited about your work?
- Do you thrive in busy environments or in small groups?
- Who do you want to hear your message--adults? high schoolers? young children?
It is also important to make your outreach accessible and approachable: meet your audience where they are. That means going to locations where they already spend time, and making the effort to connect the new information with what they already know from their own lives. Here are some examples of how you can make outreach approachable based on what your audience is already familiar with:
- Your audience likely knows how to ask questions! Use that to teach them about English sentence structure.
- Your audience might wonder why “island” has an “s,” so teach them about the influence of Latin-speaking monks on English orthographic development.
- If your audience has bilingual peers or has struggled while learning a second language, leverage this to discuss bilingual advantages or effects of age of acquisition on second language learning.
- Most people know someone neurodivergent, or are themselves neurodivergent! Use this as an opportunity to discuss how neurodiversity affects language development.
Outreach is best when it’s collaborative! Your best resources are your colleagues for bouncing off ideas and working together at events. A great place to meet fellow language science outreach enthusiasts is at LingComm. There are also often special sessions at big conferences like the Linguistic Society of America or the Human Sentence Processing conference.
Activities
We offer several resources to help you get started! This includes examples of interactive activities, helpful videos about teaching language science, and resources to include in your activity.
Activities
- Dictation and Online Translators: Participants dictate speech and compare their answer to a computer’s interpretation.
- Stroop task: Participants are times as they complete the Stroop task. Everyone loves a healthy competition, so be sure to keep track of the fastest times!
- Vocoder: Participants listen to a simulation of what speech sounds like when you have a cochlear implant.
- IPA Name Tags: An outreach volunteer ventures out into the crowd and makes name tags for people in IPA. This activity only requires a clipboard with an IPA chart, pens, and name tag stickers!
- Syntax Board: Use syntactic ambiguity to show people that sentences have underlying structure. Use a posterboard to present two different trees for one sentence, and ask visitors to match pictures corresponding to the two interpretations to the appropriate structure. (Requires a large board and time/materials to develop. May not be easily portable for all outreach events.)
- Spectrogram Activities: Ask visitors to record their name in PRAAT, and then guide them through the details of their spectrogram and print out their personal waveform. (Note: this activity requires a laptop with PRAAT and a printer, so may not always be the most portable.)
Embed: https://vimeo.com/127512408
Several activities were created in collaboration with the Language Science for Everyone consortium, including including Barbara Pearson (University of Massachusetts-Amherst), Cecile McKee (University of Arizona), Laura Wagner (The Ohio State University, the Language Pod at COSI), and Joan Maling (National Science Foundation), we've compiled a list of interactive activities. Videos below were created by the University of Arizona Developmental Psycholinguistics Lab.
Educational Resources
Omniglot: Audio files of common phrases in many languages and examples of different writing scripts
Speech Accent Archive: contains audio files of different accents of English
Interactive IPA chart
TeachLing: Western Washington University's repository of lesson plans related to language and linguistics for use in K-12 classrooms
Mutual Intelligibility Resources: A project to curate online linguistics resources.
Podcast: Lingthusiasm: A podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics
Additional resources compiled by Barbara Pearson of UMass-Amherst
Maps
Dialects
Videos
Videos can be very fun and useful to when teaching others about language science. We've listed below a number of video resources that are can be used in the classroom or at other outreach activities. Note that these require an internet connection, so think about where you will use them!
Vocal cords of four singers
MRI scan of a beatboxer
MRI scan of an opera singer
Xhosa tongue twister
Thunk on Language
The McGurk Effect
The Ling Space (various linguistic topics)
Laura's List
Compiled by Laura Wagner at The Ohio State University, here is a comprehensive list of videos ranging in topic and length that can be used to supplement classroom material or present a new idea. We've included some highlights below.
Language and Other Cognitive Systems: What is Special about Language
Genie: Deprived Child
Birth of a Language (Nicaraguan Sign Language)
How English Sounds to Non-English Speakers
Grice's Maxims
Stephen Krashen on Second Language Education
Language and Learning
Ted Talks
How Languages Evolve (Alex Gendler)
What our Language Habits Reveal (Steven Pinker)
The Birth of a Word (Deb Roy)
The Linguistic Genius of Babies (Patricia Kuhl)
Txtng is killing language. JK!!! (John McWhorter)
What Makes a Word "Real" (Anne Curzan)
Accents - Where and Why? (Kathryn Campbell-Kibler)
Literature
McKee, C., Zimmer, E., Fountain, A., Huang, H.-Y., & Vento, M. (2015). Public Outreach in Linguistics: Engaging Broader Audiences.
Lidz, J. and Kronrod, Y. (2014). Expanding our Reach and Theirs: When Linguists go to High School.
Fenichel, M. and Schweingruber, H.A. (2010). Surrounded by science: Learning science in informal environments. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Bell, P., Lewenstein, B., Shouse, A, and Feder, M. (2009). Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits. National Academies Press.
Heath, C. and Heath, D. (2007). Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. New York, NY: Random House.
Alpert, C. L. (2013). Guide to Building Partnerships between Science Museums and University-Based Research Centers. NISE Network.
Wagner, L., & McKee, C. (2023). How to Talk Language Science with Everybody. Cambridge University Press.
Oppenheimer, K. E., Salig, L. K., Thorburn, C. A., & Exton, E. L. (2022, September 11). Taking language science to zoom school: Virtual outreach to elementary school students. Language and Linguistics Compass, 16(9). https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lnc3.12471
Additional Outreach Resources
Outreach: Language Science for Everyone
Engaging with non-academic audiences reflects a core value of the Language Science Center. We strive to All students and faculty affiliated with LSC take part in outreach activities.
Some of our regular outreach activities include: hosting visits to the UMD campus from several local high schools; partnering with a student-led linguistics club at Montgomery-Blair High School; faculty mentoring of high school interns in several different Language Science labs; participating in science fairs at local elementary schools, as well as regional and national science and engineering festivals; and offering activities to over 1000 people each year at Maryland Day, UMD’s annual campus-wide celebration of innovation, creativity and academic excellence.
We are also involved in national efforts to expand language outreach, which you can read more about below.
Resources
We have developed some resources that you might find useful in planning your own activities, drawing on our own experience at the University of Maryland, and on the experience of language scientists around the world who have experiences in different ways of engaging with broader audiences.
"Why should I do outreach?" Our experiences have taught us that outreach has many benefits. Initially, encouraging members of the wider community to think critically about language science and understand its applications seemed to be the primary benefits of doing outreach. But, along the way, we realized that outreach can help the people doing the outreach as well, and this became a big motivator for the University of Maryland faculty and students who participate in our outreach events. Below, members of our community reflect on their experience engaging in outreach activities:
“Getting a chance to communicate details of my own research and the field as a whole to such a new audience really made me think about how to communicate about what we do." (Graduate Student Feedback, 2013)
“It was energizing to talk with the MBHS linguistics group. I always find it interesting to talk with non-specialist audiences, and to see how their questions differ from those of specialists. It also increased my faith in the intellectual curiosity of teenagers. Another benefit was that the visit helped me to find a summer intern for our research group, who went on to do very good work with us." (Language Science Researcher, 2013)
Doing outreach has helped many of our students build their presentation skills and explain their research to a general audience that does not share their own assumptions. If you can explain what you do to a seventh grader and can make a high schooler get excited about it, you can probably do the same with your colleague from a different department.
"How can I do outreach?" Much of the rest of our advice and resources deal with which different kinds of outreach events you may organize and how to utilize existing resources to make them successful. A well-run outreach event needs to be engaging, capable of drawing the attention of the listeners and should rely on skills or assets that you already possess. Our tips largely fall into two categories:
- Utilize Your Strengths: Your institution has angles on language science that can interest broad audiences. Whether it is interesting technology or a focus on a particular topic area, you should make sure you use those strengths to your benefit.
- Meet Them Where They Are: This can be about a physical location, but refers especially to talking about things at a level your audience will understand and relate to. Avoid minutiae, and realize that your audience will always appreciate hearing that they know more about what you’re doing than they think they do.
In order to help see some of these strategies in action, we are developing a series of resources (interactive activities, videos, and other online resources) that may be useful for bringing language science to a broader audience.
If you're interested in contributing resources of your own or have questions about doing outreach, please contact us here.
Utilize Your Strengths
You and your colleagues have a mix of talents that no other combination of people has. The flexibility of outreach means that you can put those talents to good use. Outreach works best when it involves utilizing your strengths; making use of the things that make your program unique rather than assuming that what other people emphasize will work everywhere.
Here at the University of Maryland, for example, we’re lucky to have a wide range of tools for doing laboratory-based linguistics, including eye-trackers, developmental labs, and brain-research tools like EEG, MEG, and fMRI. Those kinds of gadgets are great for getting students interested in the varieties of data-gathering that drive language science.
But those are just what we have here. In designing an outreach program, it is important to think about what makes your community special. For example, you might be strong in the documentation of rare or endangered languages, or in studies of dialect variation, both of which could be fertile areas for discussion and demonstrations. Or, you might have access to speakers from a wide range of language communities, which could contribute to activities surrounding linguistic diversity.
It may also help to think of your community as broadly as possible. Faculty members can provide gravitas in doing outreach, but enthusiastic undergraduates and graduate students can also play a key role in developing a unique and effective outreach program. Also consider including representatives from different departments or PhD programs. The critical idea is to think about your talents and interests and how to use them to creative activities that others will find as exciting as you do.
Meet Them Where They Are
It can sometimes be challenging when, in academia, we’re called to talk to people in a different department, different college, or different field. They may come prepared with a wholly foreign skill-set and an unfamiliar background that can make it challenging to find common ground. These difficulties are made even more apparent when doing outreach. That’s why it’s so important to meet them where they are; to learn how to explain insights in a way that is sensible and intriguing to outsiders and that resonates with what they already know.
Some of this “meeting where they are” is physical. Going out into the community is often aided by actually going out. Just as in your academic life, an in-person meeting with community members who may be interested in having you in to do an activity or bringing a group to your university can often be more insight-provoking than just an email or a phone call. And it can’t hurt to increase your or your university’s visibility in the world around you.
But, even more, it means meeting people where they are in terms of their background knowledge. There are very few people outside of academia who are familiar with the language sciences. Yet people are more familiar than they think with some of the things that are interesting about it. We are fortunate to have a field that can take a lot from everyday conversation and insights. For example:
- They might know people who are bilingual, or wonder why learning a second language is so hard, but haven’t heard about bilingual advantages or age of acquisition effects on second language learning.
- They know how to form a question, but they don’t realize what that can tell us about the structure of English.
- They might have realized that there is no particularly straightforward reason why the word “island” should have an “s”, but they might not have heard about the influence of Latin-speaking monk’s on English orthographic development, and so on.
Don’t be afraid to dazzle, either. Meeting them where they are is also a matter of finding cool tricks that people outside the field might find intriguing. If you have taught an introductory level course in a language science field, you might have some of these on hand that you use to liven class up a little bit. Don’t be afraid to stupefy, to astound, or to titillate. Expletive infixation in English isn’t just fun as a joke, but also as a pathway to talking about lexical stress, or morphology, or the Stroop task, or the semantics of curse words. Don’t hesitate in being theatrical, so long as you tie it in to science at some point. And including interactive activities can help, too.
Interactive Activities
Interactive activities are a great way to meet your audience where they are. They're your chance to show off cool tricks that people outside the field might find intriguing.
UMD activities
Below we've listed a few activities that we use at local science fairs. We've settled on these activities because (usually) they work quite well for us. Remember that just because they work for us, doesn't necessarily mean they're the best activities for everyone. We've included tutorials for each task if you'd like to try them out yourself, but feel free to tweak them in order to best utilize your strengths.
- Dictation and Online Translators: Participants dictate speech and then compare the computer interpretation with what they said.
- Stroop Task (pictured at right): Time participants as they complete the Stroop task and keep track of fastest times. Everyone loves a healthy competition!
- Vocoder
Other activities
Together with other language science outreach enthusiasts at UMass (Barbara Pearson), University of Arizona (Cecile McKee), Ohio State University (Laura Wagner), and the National Science Foundation (Joan Maling), we've compiled a list of interactive activities successfully used by various language scientists. Both videos below were created by the University of Arizona Developmental Psycholinguistics Lab.
- IPA Name Tags: An outreach volunteer ventures out into the crowd and makes nametags for people in IPA. This activity only requires a clipboard with an IPA chart, pens, and nametag stickers!
- Syntax Board (pictured at right): Use syntactic ambiguity to show people that sentences have underlying structure. Use a posterboard to present two different trees for one sentence, and ask visitors to match pictures corresponding to the two interpretations to the appropriate structure. (Requires a large board and time/materials to development. May not be easily portable for all outreach events.)
- Spectrogram Activities: Ask visitors to record their name in PRAAT, and then guide them through the details of their spectrogram and print out their personal waveform. (Note: this activity requires a laptop with PRAAT and a printer, so may not always be the most portable.)
Online Resources
Online Resources
This page features a variety of online resources for spreading the word about language science compiled with other language science outreach enthusiasts at UMass (Barbara Pearson), University of Arizona (Cecile McKee), Ohio State University (Laura Wagner), and the National Science Foundation (Joan Maling). Here you'll find various language maps, dialect resources, and other useful sites that can be used in the classroom or out in the community. We've included some literature about science education if you're interested in finding more tips and advice.
Maps
Langscape is a geographical information system (GIS) which maps the locations of around 6,400 languages worldwide. The interactive map links to detailed information about each language, integrating information from many different data resources. This includes information about demographics, language families, sound systems, bibliographies and expertise, plus sound recordings and texts.
Ethnologue: The Languages of the World
Modern Language Association’s Map of Languages in the United States
Education Resources
Omniglot: Audio files of common phrases in many languages and examples of different writing scripts
Speech Accent Archive: contains audio files of different accents of English
Interactive IPA chart
TeachLing: Western Washington University's repository of lesson plans related to language and linguistics for use in K-12 classrooms
Dialects
New York Times' English Dialect Quiz
International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA)
WVU Dialect Project
Pittsburgh & Speech Society
North Carolina Language & Life Project
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project
Videos
To find video resources that could be used to supplement classroom instruction, present new topics, or just expand current linguistic knowledge, visit our Video Resources page.
More Resources
Below is a list of language-related blogs, videos, books, and other educational resources compiled by Barbara Pearson at UMass. For even more online resources, check out the whole list here.
Language Hat
Language Log
The Language of Food
Science Daily: Language Acqusition News
Canadian Language Museum
Words of the Year
North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad
Outreach in the News
Language Science at the AAAS Family Science Days Festival
Maryland Day 2015
Future Language Scientists Compete in High School Olympiad
Outreach Roadshow Hits Portland
Outreach: Language Science for Everyone
Literature
McKee, C., Zimmer, E., Fountain, A., Huang, H.-Y., & Vento, M. (2015). Public Outreach in Linguistics: Engaging Broader Audiences.
Lidz, J. and Kronrod, Y. (2014). Expanding our Reach and Theirs: When Linguists go to High School.
Fenichel, M. and Schweingruber, H.A. (2010). Surrounded by science: Learning science in informal environments. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Bell, P., Lewenstein, B., Shouse, A, and Feder, M. (2009). Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits. National Academies Press.
Heath, C. and Heath, D. (2007). Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. New York, NY: Random House.
Guide to Building Partnerships between Science Museums and University-Based Research Centers