[Laura Bailey]

Hi everyone,

This isn’t my survey, but I took it and found it interesting so thought I’d share with any other syntax people who may want to contribute. They want to know what you think are the ‘threshold concepts’ (they explain this) in syntax. I think it would be especially interesting if you take it if you’re not a generative syntactician, as some of the concepts skewed more generative, I felt. Information below. Contact them if you have questions, I don’t know anything about it 🙂

Laura
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We are Michelle Troberg, Professor of Linguistics, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Language Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga and Justin Leung, PhD candidate at the Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto.

We write to invite you to participate in a series of two surveys that draw on collective experience and expertise teaching undergraduate syntax. The time commitment to complete the survey should be about 15-30 minutes asking you to reflect on what is essential to teach in undergraduate syntax. Your feedback will contribute to a UofT-funded project to improve the teaching and learning of syntax (UTM Pedagogical Research Fund 2025-27).

Our question is this: What is essential to teach in introductory/intermediate undergraduate syntax? Syntax textbooks often follow a survey model in which each chapter or unit introduces a new topic, collectively tracing the historical development of generative syntax through its central claims, major achievements, and main lines of argumentation. This works well for a reference text, but novice learners — even highly successful ones — frequently struggle to recognize the foundational concepts that unify the field across topics. Organizing instruction around a limited number of threshold concepts may provide students with a more stable conceptual framework for integrating new material.

We are investigating this question through the framework of threshold concepts. In pedagogy, threshold concepts are discipline-specific ideas that are critical to a student’s progress in the field. They satisfy at least some of these five criteria (Meyer & Land 2003, 2005):
Transformative – They cause a shift in perspective
Irreversible – Students cannot easily “unlearn” them
Integrative – They uncover the interrelatedness of concepts
Bounded – They define the boundaries between disciplines or subdisciplines
Troublesome – They are difficult and can sometimes be counterintuitive

Our aim is to identify between three and six threshold concepts in syntax spanning theory and praxis which can inform curriculum design and pedagogical practice over the long term (see Cousin 2015). In the short term, they could easily be integrated as simply recurring reference points that connect topics and skills across a syntax course.

Where you come in:
An essential part of identifying threshold concepts involves consultation with experts.
We hope you would be willing to give us a little of your time, twice, over the next few months, in the form of participating in a Delphi technique, a method of collecting opinions from experts with the goal of reaching some consensus among the group (see Wardle et al. 2022 and references therein). Here is the timeline:
Survey 1 [June-July]: You will be asked to rate possible threshold concepts according to three of the five the criteria listed above and to leave comments if you wish. Your responses will then be anonymized and aggregated with the feedback we receive from other teachers of syntax.
Survey 2 [August-September]: You will be asked to rate, again, a set of possible threshold concepts, modified this time based on the feedback from the first survey.

Your identity will be kept confidential throughout the whole process, and if you cannot continue on to the second round of ratings, that’s okay, too.

At the end of this process, we’ll send you the findings. Perhaps they will be useful to you! For our part, we will disseminate to a larger public the findings of this method in combination with the student-driven data we collect, all as part of a larger aim to contribute to a dialogue around effective ways for teaching and learning syntax.

If you are interested in participating in our study, please click the link here to access the consent form and then the survey: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/ByQzmEYf3e. Upon submission of the consent form, a link to the survey will be provided on the ending page. (If you lose the link, you can always resubmit the consent form.) Thank you for your time!

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