Linguistics 20: Hints on how to study

Bruce Hayes
Department of Linguistics
UCLA

People sometimes ask advice on how to study for Linguistics 20.  Here are my suggestions.

• Show up to class.  Yes indeed, the text often matches the class pretty closely.  But here is my own perspective:  I find that I understand academic journal articles more easily if I've already heard the author give the same paper orally at a conference.  The same principle might work for you, too.

• Budget enough time to study.  A traditional rule of thumb is two hours of study for each hour in the classroom. This is perhaps a bit extreme for my course for most people, but still I think it's right to budget time in advance to get the job done.  So plans like "On Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10-12 I will go to the library and study linguistics" make sense to me.

• Read the text.  It is  more complete and carefully done than the lectures.

• Print out the text chapters don't try to read them on screen. There's now quite a bit of research that supports this recommendation; see in particular this nice article from Scientific American .  I also think you should print the chapters in full size, not two sides to a page. 

• Bring a yellow pad with you when you read the text or otherwise are studying linguistics.

• The text is filled with Socratic questions (a Socratic question is named after Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher who famously tried to get his students to arrive at the answer themselves).  When you read, answer all the Socratic questions yourself, on your yellow pad.  Avoid the temptation to look ahead to the answer.

• Scribble comments and questions in the margins of the readings.  Then bring these questions to class or to office hours.

• Study the derivations (places where rules are applied to forms) with particular care.  This can be done at various levels; the most intensive approach is this:
  

  • Grab your yellow pad.
  • Copy down all the rules used in the derivation.  Tear this rule sheet off the pad and put it at one side on your desk.
  • Then copy the derivation itself.
  • Then cover up the derivation and redo it on your own, looking only at the sheet of rules.

• Find friends to study with.  Don't do all your studying in groups, since you have to prove to yourself that you know the material.  But talking it over with friends is often quite helpful.  Note:  be very careful that you don't copy each other's homework, even by accident; the Ling. 20 staff will prosecute all such cases.  For safety in this matter, do your write-up alone.

• Visit tomb-like, serious places when you study the hardest material.  UCLA's big library, the Young Research Library (YRL), is good for this. Try the upper floors, or the Reference Area (glassed off region on your left as you come in.) 

• Earplugs. Quiet is hard to find these days, and yelling at those rude cell phone users can be counterproductive.  Not to endorse a product or anything, but I find that the cylinder-shaped 3MTekk earplugs are very quiet and comfortable.  Look for them in hardware stores or on line.

• What to aim for in studying.  Understanding me when I lecture is part of learning, and so is understanding the text when you read it. But these activities  will only give you passive knowledge. Complete learning takes place when you work things out on paper for yourself and achieve active knowledge.  
  
  
• Consider scientific research as a basis for studying. A very interesting book, Make it Stick by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, offers advice based on research in experimental psychology.  In brief, it says:  don't read the text over and over, do try to restate and resynthesize the material for yourself.  Don't study all at once, but at intervals.  Strive for "effortful retrieval", which is resynthesis of the course material, coming from within your own mind (consulting the text where necessary), and carried out with a bit of delay after initial exposure, to make it (usefully) harder.  The evidence from experimental psychology suggest this is the strategy that will help you best. 

Further suggestions for this page are welcome; send them to me at bhayes@humnet.ucla.edu.

Link:  my web page of scientific articles about learning  

Last modified October 16, 2018