Mark J. Elson

My area of specialization, research, and teaching is Theoretical Linguistics, with concentration in Historical Morphology and Slavic languages. Pedagogy is also a major concern and challenge. In the last few years, I have emphasized what I call a bottom-up approach in my courses – thereby opposing my pedagogy to the usual top-down, textbook approach. The latter generally emphasizes memorization while the former focuses, in part, on a more empirical approach based on observation, evidence, hypotheses and the evaluation of hypotheses. This alternative is not as neat as the textbook approach, but it opens the door to a more realistic view of the investigative process, which typically, in the real world, relies on evidence, and involves alternative explanations of naturally occurring phenomena and the disputes relating to them. It also initiates students into the world of scholarship and the method by which we normally acquire knowledge. I hope to introduce students to empiricism using the study of language when undertaken by linguists as opposed to language teachers in the L2 classroom, the former being empirical, the latter top-down, but each suited to the goal of its endeavor.