Thinking Aloud About Linguistics

The Thinking Aloud About Linguistics (TAAL) project aims to help university instructors who wish to better understand where and why their students struggle with course content. While we as instructors often know which questions or topics students frequently misunderstand, we do not always know what makes that particular content challenging for our learners. One aspect of the necessary knowledge for teaching (Ball et al., 2008) is knowing where students struggle and how to adjust our instruction accordingly. The TAAL project proposes to develop metacognitive classroom activities in English linguistics that use recent technological innovation to collect and summarize students’ thinking about targeted grammar concepts. These summaries then provide instructors data to reteach and reassess course content. Metacognitive activities have long been shown to benefit students (Perry et al., 2019), as they allow learners to process and articulate their thinking. While this project focuses on linguistics and grammar, TAAL is meant to serve as a pilot for both our degree program and beyond. The goal is that the teaching and analyzing processes developed in this project can easily be transferred to other teaching contexts, in the hope that university educators across fields who seek to better understand how to support students in their content area can use these tools in their instruction.