Workshop: Project-Based Learning at the African Linguistics School

成立于2009年，非洲语言学学校（ALS）是一个为期两周的研究所每两年举行一次。下一届ALS将于2016年7月在科特迪瓦阿比让举行。该校的大多数学生是非洲大学语言学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工作。学校的学生，通过高度竞争的申请过程中选择，不支付任何费用; ALS涵盖学费，食宿，并为来自非洲内部的学生，往返学校的交通。来自北美、非洲和欧洲的教职员工从事公益性教学。 学校通过培训优秀的研究生来促进高等教育，这些研究生带着知识返回自己的机构，然后将知识传授给自己的同事和学生;一些学生继续在美国领先的语言学研究生课程中学习。ALS促进智力合作，可能导致学生，博士后和教师之间的研究合作，来自美国和非洲不同国家的参与者之间。目前赠款的具体目标是将基于项目的教学引入ALS课程，并增加学生原籍国的多样性。ALS课程的形式是讲座，其优点是为学生提供对主题的指导和高度集中的描述。然而，特别是在一个紧张的两周学院，有多少学生作为观众可以吸收的限制。为了在下一届ALS中解决这个问题，将为涉及学生团队工作的项目预留时间，以进行语言研究。这些项目将侧重于实践活动，如收集数据、对数据应用标准定义以及制定和检验假设。

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.