Learning to think like linguists: A think-aloud study of novice phonology students

A key learning outcome for undergraduate linguistics courses is for students to learn to reason scientifically about language. This article presents the findings from a think-aloud study of undergraduates in an introductory linguistics course who were in the process of learning linguistic reasoning about phonology. I describe the students’ developing concepts and make recommendations for instructors to help students develop fully formed linguistics concepts and the ability to think scientifically about language.*