Bring your students to Brock virtually!
Our Applied Linguistics Department has developed a new and exciting way for high school students to learn about the field of applied linguistics: virtual field trips to our digital campus! Hosted on Gather.town, the campus is full of resources, interactive experiments, and curated videos.
Your students are encouraged to travel throughout the department, popping into labs and offices to discover the different subfields that contribute to Applied Linguistics – a fascinating field of study that will be new to most. Students can visit the Child Language Lab to learn the milestones in speech development and then check out Jean Berko’s famous ‘wug’ experiment. After that, they can pop into our Psycholinguistics classroom, move on to our Speech Perception lab or explore materials on second language learning. The digital design replicates a university campus, allowing students to experience what labs and classrooms are really like. The variety of resources highlights how subject like Psychology, Sociology, English, History, and the Natural Sciences all interconnect to inform the study of Applied Linguistics. This is a great opportunity to introduce high-school students to some concepts and themes they may not have been exposed to before, in a very hands-on way!
Watch this video
to get an idea of what your students can expect while on their field trip to the Brock Applied Linguistics Digital Campus.
Join the Gather.town site with your students and be met by our facilitators from the Digital Campus Resource Team, where we will:
- Help orient your students, tell them how to navigate our site, answer any questions they may have.
- Allow your students to roam around, check out virtual resources, and try experiments that resemble the type of work applied linguists do.
- Create a space for your students to share their discoveries with their peers, and ask questions of our knowledgeable facilitators using chat, video, and audio features.
A look into our Psycholinguistics lab, containing a number of resources and fun experiments!
A sample of an experiment that can be found within the Psycholinguistics lab – Students can test their ability on deciding between real English words and not real English words.
There's More
We are also providing the opportunity for teachers to collaborate with the resource team on the creation of a follow-up assignment that will allow your students to synthesize what they’ve learned about Applied Linguistics through our experiments and resources.
