Assignments and Assessment
Daily Preparation, Participation and Practice (40% total)
1. Attendance (10%): You are required to attend every class and fully participate in discussions. Tardiness or lack of participation will result in half credit. If present for less than half the class time, you will receive a zero. For each class meeting one or more of social annotations, exercises and quizzes (#2-4 below) will be assigned. Check Canvas regularly for updates since these three assignments are not listed in the semester schedule. Details to be announced. See the Attendance Policy on p. 3.
2. Social annotation (5%): You will be asked to read and annotate selected articles or book chapters/sections (enter one or more comments or questions), each set up as a Canvas assignment. These assignments are typically set up for student-led discussion readings and occasionally for selected readings for lectures to solicit any questions you may have. You are encouraged to reply to classmates’ comments and questions at any time. [The two lowest grades will be dropped.]
3. Exercises (15%): There will be frequent in-class, preparation or review (take-home) exercises. They may or may not be announced in advance. [The two lowest grades will be dropped.]
4. Quizzes (10%): There will be several online quizzes, typically one or two for each unit. Quizzes are designed to check your understanding of technical linguistic concepts through new examples (w/English gloss and translation) or to have you to prepare for an upcoming class. Quizzes may or may not be open book, and some quizzes allow for multiple attempts. Please check the setting for each quiz.
Analyses and Applications (30% total)
5. Homework assignments (24%): There will be four homework assignments. The assignments typically include problem sets that require short answers and analyses of language samples (with transliteration/translation). They are open note/book, and you can work with others as long as you don’t directly give/receive answers to/from them.
6. Discussions (6%): You will be leading one solo discussion or two pair discussions. Each discussion is about 15 minutes. In your discussion, (1) present a summary of the assigned readings and (2) lead a Q & A session, including at least one discussion question of your own. Guidelines will be provided.
Personalized Work (30% total)
7. Journal entries (15%): You will be submitting three journal assignments (1 page, single-spaced, 350–500 words + references). The purposes of the journals are: to practice formulating research questions; to support arguments using examples; and to use technical concepts in a new context. Journals can be exploratory but must be centered on one main point, motivated by a specific idea expressed in a source (e.g., a quote from an article) and must incorporate language examples. Guidelines will be provided.
8. Project (15%): Your project must deal with the Japanese language and/or be informed or inspired by research in Japanese linguistics. You have two options: writing a traditional linguistics research paper (6+ pages double-spaced) or creating a practical resource, such as language learning material based on linguistic analyses (e.g., frequency data). In either case, your work must incorporate primary sources (e.g. film transcripts, song lyrics data, etc.) and secondary sources (e.g., journal articles). Guidelines will be distributed.
Course Grade
Grades on individual items will be updated periodically on Canvas. The weighted total (based on items 1-8 above) will translate to letter grades as follows. Borderline grades will be rounded up or down depending on the participation grade; the quality of your paper, discussion leading; and improvement over the semester. A 100-93, A- 92-90, B+ 89-87, B 86-83, B- 82-80 , C+ 79-77, C 76-73, C- 72-70, D 69-60, F, 59-0
