"Language in the News" instructions:

News teams consisting of two students working together (that's what team means) prepare a 7 to 10 minute presentation on a language issue "in the news."  Summarize a news story that deal with a language issue, give your take on the situation, and prepare two discussion questions for the class to discuss (and lead that discussion).

Your presentation is a joint one, but each team member should hand in a short essay of 500-800 words in which you describe the news item and present your own analysis of its significance, taking into account the class discussion of your presentation. Your essay will be due no more than one week after your presentation, and should be emailed to me.

Please title the essay file yourlastname402lin. Suitable file formats include .doc, .docx, .txt, and .pdf.

It will be your responsibility to get in touch with the other member of your team. In cases where there is an odd number of students enrolled, one or more students may present individually rather than as team members.

As for the topic, you may use any source you like, and any subject related to language is fair game: whether usage, grammar, politics, law, protest, new words, complaints, rules, speech, writing, instruction, technology, to name just a few.

And while our subject is English, any language, or group of languages, can be the subject of the story, provided that you connect it somehow to what's going on with the English language.

Good places to find sources are the online editions of newspapers, TV network newsroom sites, and magazines; the Lexis/Nexis database (which you can access through the university library web site); YouTube and other video sites, and news aggregators like Google and Yahoo, which can be searched.

You can get an idea of what to by looking at the Web of Language posts -- but don't simply report on a WOL post, because that would be too easy -- the idea is for you to develop the topic and present it.

You must have a source, and you should provide a web link, if there is one, or other illustrative material (video screen captures, sound files, anything we can display on the screen in our web-connected "smart" classroom. 

I'll post your name and the date of your presentation on a revised syllabus once everyone signs up.