Workshop: Project-Based Learning at the African Linguistics School

非洲语言学校(ALS)成立于2009年，是一个为期两周的研究所，每两年举办一次。下一届ALS将于2016年7月在象牙海岸的阿比让举行。该学院的学员大多是非洲大学语言学专业的研究生和博士后学者。与会者还包括来自美国大学的研究生。ALS的目的是为学生提供语言学核心领域的最新研究成果。该学院的学生通过竞争激烈的申请程序被选中，不支付任何费用；ALS包括学费、食宿，对于来自非洲境内的学生，还包括往返学校的交通费用。来自北美、非洲和欧洲的教职员工无偿授课。该学院通过培训优秀的研究生来促进高等教育，这些研究生回到学校后，带着知识传授给自己的同事和学生；一些学生继续在美国一流的语言学研究生项目学习。ALS促进智力合作，这可能会导致学生、博士后和教师之间的研究合作，以及来自美国和非洲不同国家的参与者之间的研究合作。目前拨款的具体目标是在肌萎缩侧索硬化症课程中引入基于项目的教学，并在原籍国方面增加学生的多样性。肌萎缩侧索硬化症课程的形式一直是讲座，它的优势是为学生提供对主题的指导和高度集中的描述。然而，尤其是在一个紧张的为期两周的学院里，作为观众可以吸收的学生数量是有限的。为了在下一届ALS中解决这一问题，将保留时间用于让学生以小组形式开展语言研究的项目。这些项目将侧重于实践活动，如获取数据、对数据应用标准定义以及制定和测试假设。

Inaugurated in 2009, the African Linguistics School (ALS) is a two-week institute held biennially. The next ALS will be held in July 2016, in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Most of those in attendance at the school are graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in linguistics at African universities. The attendees also include graduate students from American universities. The aim of the ALS is to provide students with the latest work in core areas of linguistics. The school's students, selected through a highly competitive application process, pay no fees; the ALS covers tuition, room and board, and, for students coming from within Africa, transportation to and from the school. Faculty members, drawn from North America, Africa, and Europe, teach pro bono. The school promotes higher education through the training of outstanding graduate students who return to their institutions with knowledge that they then impart to their own colleagues and students; A number of the students go on to study at leading American graduate programs in linguistics. The ALS promotes intellectual cooperation that may lead to research collaborations among students, postdocs, and faculty, among participants from the US and different countries in Africa. The specific goals of the current grant are to introduce project-based teaching into the ALS curriculum and to increase the diversity of the students in terms of country of origin. The format for ALS courses has been lectures, which have the advantage of providing students with a guided and highly concentrated description of the subject matter. However, especially in an intense two-week institute, there come to be limits as to how much students as audience can absorb. To address this at the next ALS, time will be reserved for projects that involve students working in teams to carry out linguistic research. The projects will focus on hands-on activities, such as eliciting data, applying standard definitions to data, and formulating and testing hypotheses.