Citizen Sociolinguistics: Making Connections in the Foreign Language Classroom

The current study explores implementing the Connections Standards in language curriculum. To foster learners' critical thinking abilities, we suggest engaging students in interpreting and analyzing information available in open-source media. In our experiment in a fourth-year Korean class at a university in the northeastern United States, as “citizen sociolinguists,” students carried out a sociolinguistic exploration on Korean language uses in a wide array of Internet-based media and share their interpretation of their social meanings. The data come from the students' final presentations, which covered a range of sociolinguistic issues such as Konglish, neologism (word coinage), and gendered speech. The results showed that students applied their critical thinking skills to analyzing various language uses in contemporary Korean and developed informed perspectives on diverse sociolinguistic issues.