The classes on this page are fully online and anyone is welcome to use and/or modify them
materials in any way they want. Each of these is basically a series of activities for learning or teaching
a given subject.
If you are interested in learning one of these subjects, click the link and you can take
the class on your own; the materials include some instructions about how to use them. I think you will
learn the stuff best if you do the activities as intended, but you can go through them in any way
you like.
If you are planning to teach a class on one of these or a similar subject, you are welcome
to use any of these classes wholesale, or (more likely) to pick and choose activities that you like and
integrate them into your own class. Each of these classes is designed as several modules, so it should be
easy to lift specific modules (or specific activities or materials from within specific modules) and use
them in other contexts.
How this works
When I teach any of these classes, the "class" is a bunch of online modules, and each module
consists of a series of activities for students do to. When a student has finished all the activities
they need to do and done so at a satisfactory level, they are considered to have "completed" that module (this
is on a pass/fail basis). The final grade they get at the end of the class is based on the number and difficulty
of modules they complete. The course outline they are shown at the beginning of the class shows which
"bundles" of activities need to be completed for a given grade (e.g., "To get a C you must complete 6 modules,
to get a B you must complete eight modules, to get an A you must complete ten modules plus a special project",
stuff like that). This system is known as "specifications grading".
If you use these materials in your own class or if you use them to do your own studying, you of course are not
obligated to follow this system or to "grade" yourself; you can use those bundles, however, to help guide yourself
through the class and decide which modules to do.
For the classes here, each page includes a course outline (syllabus) with a description of the
grade bundles, as well as descriptions of extra activities/assignments, and finally includes links to each module's
content. Some modules also include explanatory notes; these are things that I did not include in the actual online
materials when I taught the class, but are more notes-to-self (or, now, notes to you) about how I implemented particular
activities, things that didn't work out well and that might be done differently next time around, etc.
You can access the content and activities of any of these classes by clicking the links below, or if you
want to save them you can download any class as a .zip file. After downloading it, simply unzip the file into a folder
somewhere, and then click the "index.html" file to open it in your browser, and you should see the same stuff as what you
see on this website.
Everything in each class is released under a CC-BY
license, which means you can do anything you want with these materials and can change/adapt them in any way you like,
as long as you acknowledge that you got it from here.
This is an MA-level course on psycholinguistics I taught in summer 2021 at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
with a focus on introducing the learner to common psycholinguistic methods and techniques. I taught similar courses at
the BA level and thus this class (perhaps with slight modifications) should be appropriate for students at either
level. An older version
of this class is also available.
This is an MA-level class I taught in fall 2020 at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University called
"Contrastive Analysis". I didn't teach real contrastive
analysis in this class, though, because I don't even really understand what that is. Instead, the class in practice
was an introduction to linguistics, with a focus on using those linguistic concepts to examine some interesting and
enlightening differences between the grammars of English and Chinese languages. While the medium of instruction and
interaction is English, many of the examples and activities are about Chinese, and thus the class is probably most
appropriate for Chinese-English bilinguals, although if you are teaching a similar class you can probably easily adapt
many of the examples and activities to not be specific to these languages. While this was an MA class, it should be
appropriate to any post-secondary students with little to no previous linguistic background.
This is a doctoral-level research methods course I taught together with Yao Yao
in fall 2020 at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. It is probably also appropriate for masters and bachelors
students if they are, or plan to be, getting involved in hands-on research.