The Linguistics Roadshow

2.1 Audiences

School students in Years 7–10 (i.e. aged 12–16) were chosen as the target audience for the Roadshow, given the curriculum pressures facing older students.^[7] Students from rural schools were selected as we wanted to address the gap between study areas available for rural compared to urban students (e.g. Dean et al. 2023) and introduce a less familiar university discipline in a relatable way. Focusing on school students also allows access to secondary audiences such as teachers, family, and friends. The wider Australian public were also considered as a more abstract audience, as they would be able to access some of our materials through the Linguistics Roadshow website.

2.2 Workshop design considerations

To ensure the Roadshow was an appealing event for schools, visits were designed to be fully contained incursions, meaning that the schools needed only to provide a large space, a time slot of about 100 min, and students. We planned to bring all of the required equipment with us, including laptops, speakers, projectors, portable projector screen, iPads, souvenir items, and everything students would need for the activities.

In the first year, we relied on personal contacts with rural teachers to connect us to two of the schools we visited, giving us a starting point to liaise with school administrators. Other visits were organized by directly contacting schools, generally via calling teachers responsible for English and languages programmes, with a follow-up email attaching the full details. To make the Roadshow more feasible and efficient, for each visit we ensured we had a number of schools to visit over a multi-day trip, and other events to attend on each trip. While we had no doubt there would be interest from teachers, in recognition of their limited time capacity we knew we needed to clearly demonstrate the value of the programme. In contacting schools, we foregrounded the educational importance of the programme (Figure 1), and then reiterated the relevance and importance of our messages during the visits, with teachers present as a secondary audience.

Figure 1:

The information about the Roadshow distributed to teachers after initial contact.

The workshop was designed to be an engaging school-time event with additional materials to take home (Section 3.2.3), and further resources on our website (Section 3.3). We were mindful of students’ capacity and willingness to sit still and listen for extended periods of time. We also wanted to give information in a punchy way that delivered messages quickly and accurately. We therefore decided to have discrete parts in the school visits, including a quiz, a talk, and action stations (discussed in Section 3). This meant there was the opportunity for students to move around, and for information to be presented in different ways. To ensure the content was relatable and accessible, all activities provided opportunities for students to reflect on their use of language across a range of topics, including sociolinguistic variation and language acquisition. Indigenous students make up a larger minority in rural schools than in most urban schools and, with this in mind, we wanted to open up conversations about diversity within Aboriginal Englishes and Australian Indigenous languages as a way to recognize and celebrate the linguistic heritage of Australia’s First Nations people.

3.1 Core messages

The Roadshow focuses on three core messages and aims to reinforce these across the different components of the programme. These messages are given below:

1. Linguistic diversity at the global level

   1. there are more than 7,000 languages around the world

   2. linguistic diversity is distributed unevenly, with some relatively small regions with many languages and some large regions with relatively few languages

   3. languages vary in many ways, including in the structure and meanings of words, how words combine into sentences, the sounds of speech, and the elements of sign

2. Australia’s rich linguistic landscape

   1. Australia is home to many spoken and signed languages, including hundreds of traditional and new Indigenous languages, and migrant languages (including English)

   2. Australian English emerged from a mixture of dialects from across the British Isles

3. Linguistic variation in Australian English

   1. there is significant variation in the ways that individuals and groups use English in Australia, and in language use across contexts

   2. all of these different ways of using the language are equally correct, and prescriptive and discriminatory attitudes need to be questioned

   3. descriptive data can reveal patterns of language use

   4. communication is multimodal

   5. writing is largely an attempt to capture a spoken or signed language, and not all languages have a written version

   6. languages change, and young people tend to lead language change

3.2 School visits

We designed the delivery of the programme to be dynamic and high energy, avoiding technical terminology and prioritizing accessible activities demonstrating something new (and maybe surprising) about how languages work. Most importantly, we aimed to relate to students’ everyday experience with language, and chose topics that would generate discussion and invite differing opinions and insights. The final structure of the school visits was a two-hour workshop for groups of up to 60 students, beginning with a quiz, then a short talk presented by three or four linguists in turn, followed by three hands-on activities that students rotated through. In the sections below we describe the various aspects of the two-hour workshop in greater detail.

3.2.1 Pre-quiz and talk

The Roadshow begins with a brief welcome from the Roadies (each wearing a Roadshow T-shirt with their name on the back) and an acknowledgement of the Traditional Owners and the languages of the land the workshop is being held on, if possible with a ‘welcome’ or ‘hello’ from local languages featured on the slides.^[8] We then distribute a short paper-based quiz (Figure 2) and play some fun music^[9] while the students complete it (Figure 3). The quiz is intended to get a general sense of what students know about language, including questions targeting common misconceptions around linguistic diversity, multilingualism, and language modalities. It is also designed to raise some questions in the minds of the students that will then be answered in the course of the workshop. Once students have completed the quiz, we begin the talk.

Figure 2:

Part of the Linguistics Roadshow quiz.

Figure 3:

Students completing the quiz.

The talk lasts for 10–15 min and rotates around presenters.^[10] It follows the loose structure below:

1. welcome and intro

   1. what is linguistics and what is a language?

2. global diversity

3. language acquisition

4. language in Australia

5. language: you’re doing it right!

   1. linguistic variation

   2. language change

   [students complete action stations; see Section 3.2.2].

6. what can you do with linguistics?

7. questions

We use a set of colourful and interactive slides to pace the talk and provide a focal point. We script and learn the talk beforehand to ensure the content is clear and engaging and to keep us within the time frame. At the start of each section we generally pose a question, inviting the students to consider some central point (e.g. “So where did Australian English come from?”), and then we take them through key aspects in an engaging way, sometimes briefly entertaining common or humorous misconceptions (e.g. “Did Australians develop a unique accent because they had to keep their mouths closed to stop all the flies getting in?”) before discussing the real answer. We deliver the talk in a dynamic and fun manner, interacting with the audience and each other and keeping the energy high.

3.2.2 Action stations

Next we divide the students into three groups and allocate each group to an action station supervised by one of the Roadies. Students remain at each action station for 20 min and then rotate to the next. Various activities have been developed and used across different Roadshow visits; we profile three representative activities here.^[11]

3.2.2.1 Babel in your own Backyard (words around Australia survey)

To begin this activity, students complete a paper survey (https://bit.ly/AusWords) containing 12 questions targeting regional variation in Australian English (e.g. “What general term do you use to refer to swimwear?”), and also gathering basic demographic information. The survey focuses mainly on publicly known lexical variables, for example, the seemingly perennial and fiery debate around whether to call a battered, deep-fried potato snack a potato cake (the preferred Victorian variant) or a (potato) scallop (the New South Wales variant). In the action station, we then go through the students’ answers, discussing any variation that occurs, and explore maps of the variation together (discussed further in Section 4), noting which words pattern strongly according to different parameters (e.g. state; urban vs. rural) and which do not. We use the maps as the basis for further discussion of linguistic variation drawing on students’ own experiences, and discussing language attitudes (Figure 4).

Figure 4:

Roadie Rosey with the Roadshow maps.

3.2.2.2 Languages of the Land (Dyirbal Jumble activity)

This activity is designed to introduce students to diversity in the morphosyntax of the world’s languages through the window of noun classes in Dyirbal,^[12] a north-east Australian Aboriginal language. In the activity, students are asked to imagine they are linguists working with speakers to document an Australian language. They have collected a set of phrases and their translations, but they need to figure out the best way to analyse them. In the first part of the activity, the students are given an envelope of 20 laminated cards with two-word Dyirbal phrases and a picture on them (Figure 5). Students are told that the phrases all refer to nouns (i.e. the kinds of words that name a person, place, or thing). Their first task is to figure out how best to allocate the phrases into broader groups, and to look for “clues” in the words to figure out the best way to group them (Figure 6). The students should notice that the first word in each phrase identifies the group (i.e. noun class) that phrase belongs to (either bayi, balan, balam, or bala). Once the students have successfully categorized the phrases into four groups, they try to work out the semantic basis for each group.

Figure 5:

Material from Task 1 of the Dyirbal Jumble activity.

Figure 6:

Students puzzling over the Dyirbal Jumble activity.

In the second part of the activity, an envelope with a further 10 cards is provided – this time with the noun class marker omitted. Based on their semantic classifications from the first part, they try to allocate each of these to one of the four categories. We then round up the activity with a discussion touching on details of the Dyirbal language, aspects of the data the students found interesting, and language diversity within the context of language loss.

3.2.2.3 Seeing sounds

This action station focuses on speech production. In small groups, students are introduced to the basics of the vocal tract and the articulators, and are provided with iPads and A5 laminated handouts with mid-sagittal representations of the bilabial, dental, and velar places of articulation (Figure 7). The graphics on these handouts were designed as trigger images for an augmented reality app, Aurasma.^[13] Pointing the iPad camera at each image triggers a video overlay showing each speech sound being produced during MRI imaging.^[14] A second part to the activity focuses on acoustics, and uses a four-sided shape with spectrogram images for animal names in different languages to trigger audio to accompany the images.

Figure 7:

Example of materials used with the augmented reality app. Mid-sagittal images created with reference to “Sammy” Interactive Sagittal Section created by Daniel Currie Hall (https://incl.pl/sammy/). Other graphical elements taken from vectors available via Freepik and Vecteezy (with relevant permissions).

3.3 The Roadshow website

The Linguistics Roadshow website (https://lingroadshow.com) has a range of purposes. In the first instance, the website hosts information about the project itself – what the Roadshow is, who we are, and how we can be contacted. Its main purpose, however, is to serve as a home for useful and interesting information about language and linguistics for a general audience, and especially teachers and students. The information on the site parallels the content of the in-person Roadshow visits, and reflects and expands on the Roadshow’s core messages (Section 3.1). A key function of the site is to provide activities for teachers to add linguistics to classroom curricula across multiple year levels. These activities were initially based around our action station activities but the current iteration of the site^[19] includes an expanded set and links to resources available elsewhere. The website also hosts the set of popular maps from our Words around Australia survey (Section 3.2.2).

5.1 Challenges

The Roadshow was our first experience in conducting a large-scale outreach project, and we have modified the design and delivery as we have learned more throughout the process. It has been a rewarding and successful outreach programme, albeit with some challenges that may be relevant and instructive for others attempting outreach like this. Key obstacles for the longevity of the Roadshow – and for this type of outreach generally – include (a) securing (ongoing) funding; (b) scaling up and expanding to other locations; (c) reliance on precariously employed staff; and (d) the sustainable maintenance of resources.

Versions of the Roadshow can be run on a very small budget (e.g. a single linguist could give the talk at a local school at no cost). To run it in full, it incurs costs for travel, accommodation, and producing items for the show bags. It was only possible for us to run the Roadshow in its original format because CoEDL awarded us money for this idea. Funding also impacts how the Roadshow can be run in other locations. We attempted to expand the programme by promoting it at linguistics conferences and holding training workshops, with the aim of creating satellite versions around Australia. However, despite enthusiasm, no other teams were started, in part due to the issue of funding. Even with existing funding, attempting a cross-institutional outreach programme presents issues in a way that cross-institutional academic collaboration does not.

Beyond this, managing expectations in expanding the Roadshow was difficult in terms of where the Roadshow was run. Following the surprise success of the first year of the Roadshow and the interest generated by the maps on lexical variation, we were approached by a number of city-based schools. Unfortunately, we did not have the capacity to run the full workshop multiple times a year, and so focused our resources on maintaining our commitment to rural students. Through a booking system of some kind, it could be possible to arrange talk-only or talk-and-activity versions of the Roadshow, but this poses difficulties when considering availability of personnel, which is on a voluntary basis.

Reliance on precariously employed staff posed and continues to pose an issue, which – since this was a passion project rather than institutionally managed – meant that it became difficult to ensure the continuation of the Roadshow in person, as we progressed with our careers and moved institutions. The benefits in doing this type of outreach as early career researchers, however, were great, and very valuable in terms of professional development. Further, though not always formally acknowledged, universities have been very positive about the skills we have demonstrated through creating the Roadshow and in some cases have continued to fund Roadshow-related activities.

Lastly, maintaining the Roadshow resources requires considerable effort. Maintaining the website takes time, and we aim to continue to add to the online resources. Existing activities can require regular updating, particularly if dependent on specific technologies.

5.2 Sustainability moving forward

From our experiences with the Roadshow, we make the following suggestions to enhance the sustainability of this type of public outreach:

1. Tangible university-level acknowledgement of outreach and engagement activities in academic workloads would provide a real-world payoff for conducting this type of work.

2. A central funding scheme, not associated with one institution, would make this type of project easier to develop and implement across universities.

3. For this intensive type of outreach, embedding an outreach and engagement component into research/postgraduate degrees would result in more people on the ground, while also giving training for linguists to continue this type of work later in their career. It could also be incorporated into undergraduate coursework.

For us, a crucial pivot for the Roadshow in recent years has been changing our focus from rural school incursions to maintaining the website and online resources – made possible in part by funding from Monash University. These resources are open-ended in terms of end users; teachers in schools can download activities, while linguists can download the slides to present the talk to students in their area. This means the main aims of the Roadshow – primarily to introduce high school students to the science of language – are possible in different formats. Our vision for the future of the Roadshow is that it should be a central place for teachers and students to access reliable materials on language-related topics, and for linguists to have tried-and-tested materials to use as outreach materials.