7 - Creating Relevance by Making Connections

Summary

Emphasizing other people’s perspectives on the demonstrations that readers are developing, Chapter 7 opens by asking readers to imagine specific people who they might encounter in an informal learning setting and to reflect on why those people might care about their topic area and what they might already know about it. The chapter then reviews several examples of connections between language and broader, real-world experiences that many people are likely to have had. One of the advertising examples uses Bounty’s "quicker picker upper" phrase to show morphological processes. One of the cell phone examples uses mistakes in automatic speech recognition to show sociolinguistic comparisons across accents and genders. One of the popular song examples uses mondegreens (or misperceptions of lyrics such as Taylor Swift’s "lonely Starbucks lovers") to show phonotactic regularities. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to write down specific ways that people might encounter their demonstration’s central topic in everyday life.