Other courses
Relevant coursework from various courses throughout my four-year Bachelor’s degree
Courses
Though these courses were not officially part of my individual major coursework, they included content and/or assignments that were relevant to applied linguistics. On this page, I have selected some material from other courses that
Course Content
GCON 113- The Tradition Beginning: The Greeks and the Hebrews (fall 2019)
The exegesis assignment, which I completed during my first semester at St. Olaf, involved a close reading of a Bible verse informed by historical linguistics and research about the linguistic context of the particular verse. In this essay, I analyzed my chosen verse from Exodus using a linguistic and historical lens. The assignment can be found below.
GCON 218- The Tradition in Crisis: Dissenters and Defenders (spring 2021)
The synthesis essay was completed at the end of my time in the Great Conversation program at St. Olaf. The paper called on sources read throughout all five courses that Great Con was comprised of, and used linguistic analysis to make philosophical connections over centuries of works from the Western canon. This assignment is linked below.
EDUC 295- Foundations of Education (fall 2022)
The personalized plan of action assignment, which I completed with a theoretical classroom in mind, discusses my personal philosophy towards teaching and how I would conduct a classroom. This carries over to speech pathology, as I would employ many of the same principles in that practice as I would in the classroom. Speech therapy can function as a kind of classroom, so this document remains relevant, and is informed by sociolinguistic theories of language acquisition and equity in the classroom. The following document, found below, contains guiding principles for my theoretical classroom and a rationale for each.
NORST 277- Islamic Communities in Scandinavia (fall 2022)
This course was tangentially related to the Norwegian multiethnolect in that it focused on minority communities within a Scandinavian context. Many NMET speakers come from culturally Islamic backgrounds. However, because I have already done several research projects on NMET, I opted to pick a different subject that I had not yet investigated. For this final paper, I chose to examine the status of translating the Qur’an into Scandinavian languages, which has been a somewhat contentious issue, as some consider translation to be a form of blasphemy in the form of changing the original holy text. The following paper, linked below, dives into these issues with a Scandinavian backdrop.
EDUC 270- Exploring Teaching (interim 2023)
This course was an immersive month-long field experience in an elementary school in Faribault, MN. I accompanied a teacher who specialized in teaching English learners and assisted her in Kindergarten, 2nd grade, and 3rd grade classrooms. The district that this school is located in has a high Somali immigrant population, which meant that around half of the students required EL support. I also got to shadow the speech pathologist working at this school, and got practical experience working with EL and developmentally delayed children. This was an extremely rich experience that showed me the everyday applications of linguistics in an educational setting. The following is a presentation I gave at the end of my experience outlining what I learned and my takeaways from the month I spent in the elementary school. The slides are linked below.
EDUC 245- Teaching and Learning English Grammar (spring 2023)
This course had a lot of relevance for my individual major. It focuses on English grammar within the context of the classroom, with a special focus on how this can be used for language discrimination and how to avoid alienating students who use non-standard forms of English. From this course, two assignments were relevant to my major. The first was the code switching study, in which I observed my own language use in different contexts and theorized on what kind of language is appropriate for each unique circumstance. This meta-linguistic analysis can be found below. The second assignment was a student case study, in which I received a sample of student writing and came up with a plan for appropriate grammar instruction for that student. The plan included a hierarchy of errors to be addressed and commentary about how each error could be approached in the classroom. This case study is linked below.