Voices of North Carolina Curriculum Resources

NCSU Resources

The NC State linguistics program has created many resources that can help teachers discuss language and culture. Please explore some of our projects at the following links, as well as some links to other educational materials that may be useful to teachers.

• Voices of North Carolina Dialect Awareness Curriculum (for 8th graders)
  Voices of North Carolina is a multi-media dialect awareness curriculum that helps enrich social studies instruction in North Carolina. The curriculum is endorsed by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, and is designed to help teachers meet states standard course of study for 8th grade social. The 450-minute curriculum requires no background in linguistics or specialized training to be taught successfully, and all the materials are offered free of charge.


• Related lessons on LearnNC.org
  The following lessons are stand alone lessons that have been adapted from the Voices of North Carolina curriculum by Hannah Askin:
  
  
  • Lesson on Outer Banks English
  • Lesson on Language Change in North Carolina’s Cities
  • Lesson on African American English
  • Lesson on Spanish and Hispanic English


• Play Dialect Jeopardy!
  


• Test Your Tarheel Talk
  A flash-based, interactive learning module and dialect quiz originally created for the North Carolina History Museum’s 2007 Family Day event. The quiz has users listen to voices and attempt to locate them on a map of the state. The user may then learn more about the region’s history and language, watch a video clip about the area, or continue on with the quiz.


• NCLLP YouTube Page
  A repository of video clips from many of the North Carolina Language and Life Project’s documentaries including some from documentaries not used in the curriculum, such as The Queen Family and This Side of the River.


• Dialects and gender curriculum for 11th grade American Literature
  Coming soon!

Other Resources

• Do You Speak American? Online Curriculum
  This curriculum has been designed to support Do You Speak American? for high school and college students and includes five units based on the three-hour PBS television program. The resources provided on this web site are available free of charge; each unit of study provides strategies for integrating video segments from the program, other resources on the Do You Speak American? web site and web-based resources found elsewhere on the internet. Each unit features instructional tools, discussion questions, student activities, and a bibliography. The five units are: Perspectives on written and spoken English; Major regional dialects; African American English; Spanish and Chicano English; Communicative choices and linguistic style.


• TeachLing
  This site is a repository of lesson plans related to language and linguistics for use in K-12 classrooms. Some of them have been developed by linguists, some by K-12 teachers, and some by both. This site is ever-growing and allows users to add their own lesson plans, comment on existing lesson plans, or discuss related issues.


• The Linguistic Society of America’s “Frequently Asked Questions about Linguistics” publications
  The LSA publishes a series of educational and authoritative pamphlets on language-related issues. Written with the layperson in mind, FAQs have been used as instructional aids in linguistics courses, at information sessions for undergraduates and prospective majors interested in linguistics courses, and as part of outreach program to professionals in other fields. Topics include endangered languages, language acquisition, bilingualism, how medical conditions affect communication, Ebonics, sign language, etc. The pamphlets can be downloaded for free.