Course syllabus

AF1320 African Languages, Independent Project at Bachelor Level, 15 credits

In this course students will practice writing and defending their own scholarly work using idiomatic academic English. Having consulted the supervisor, students will practice planning a linguistic study and independently carry it out and present the findings. Students will also defend their theses at a seminar where they also review another thesis in a critical and constructive way.

Term: Spring 2024, starts 15 January, ends 2 June
Credits: 15 ects
Study Pace: 20 working hours/week
Teacher: Morgan Nilsson
Schedule: Seminars at times agreed upon with the students.

 

 

General Rules for Essays at our department

For bachelor, magister and master essays the Department of Languages and Literatures has prepared special guidelines for assessment in order to secure the quality of the assessment procedure and clearly state the assessment criteria to the students.  All information about the examination procedure and the guidelines for the assessment of the essay can be found at
https://canvas.gu.se/courses/35666/assignments/syllabus (in English)
https://canvas.gu.se/courses/34852/assignments/syllabus (in Swedish)

The guidelines used for examination and assessment of essays are the same for all courses at the Department of Languages and Literatures.
They clearly state and explain all the criteria that are taken into account when assessing an essay. 

 

Structure, References and Glossing in your essay

When you want to publish a text, such as a thesis or an article, the journal or the publisher usually require that you follow rather detailed rules for the structure and format of the text.

Since it is very common in African linguistics to follow the LSA style rules presented in the documents below, you are strongly encouraged to read through and to follow these rules as much as you can.

Linguistic Society of America’s Unified Stylesheet for the list of references:
https://library.umw.edu/citing/lsa

Leipzig Glossing Rules for the language data examples:
https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php
If the glosses that you need are not listed in the article, you may want to look for them in this helpful list on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations

Leipzig Generic Style Rules for Linguistics for the article/essay as a whole:
https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistics/past-research-resources/resources/generic-style-rules/

 

Readings

All the reading materials needed for this course will be available online.

Recommended for reference

 

Zotero

There are different programs that can be used to handle the references in your text in a semi-automatic way. One such program is Zotero. Our university library offers introductory courses for users of Zotero. On this page you can also find out how to install Zotero:

https://www.ub.gu.se/sv/tjanster-och-stod/hjalp-med-endnote-och-zotero/visningar-av-zotero

 

Uoriginal och plagiat

  • Plagiat innebär att man på otillåtet vis har ”lånat” text från en bok eller en artikel, eller att man tagit information direkt från nätet. För att motverka detta använder universitetet systemet Urkund, som innebär att ditt arbete skickas in via ett särskilt ”filter”.
  • Det är väldigt viktigt att du i alla dina inlämningsuppgifter följer vedertagna regler för referenshantering och citatteknik:
    Du måste alltid noggrant ange dina källor.
  • Mer om plagiat, vad det innebär och hur du undviker det, finns att läsa på UB:s hemsida:
    http://www.ub.gu.se/skriva/plagiering/ och på:
    http://www.ub.gu.se/ref/Refero/1intro.php