Course Description & Objectives
This course provides a broad overview of basic concepts and issues involved in dealing with general sociolinguistics. The course introduces students to the correlation of social structure and linguistic behavior, with the focus placed on how language relates to linguistic variables, like race, gender, socioeconomic status, social class, bilingual-/multilingualism and stylist variation. We will be also reading several papers on how these linguistic variables are manifested in the context of Taiwan. 

 

By the end of the course, students are expected to be able to:
    Gain an understanding of how language and society are related to each other;
    Define basic concepts used in sociolinguistic studies; 
    Collect sociolinguistic data in real-world settings using proper methods, and analyze numeric data using basic quantitative and statistical tools that can be transferred to other areas of research;
    Formulate and test hypotheses about sociolinguistic topics. 

 

This course is conducted through the instructor’s lectures, pop quizzes, homework assignments, four quizzes, group projects and group presentations. Students are required to preview the assigned reading per week and bring their questions or comments to the class.