Two Linguists, a Teacher, and Some Middle-School Students Walk into a Room

This presentation surveys a decade of thinking linguistically with Seattle middle-school students and their teacher, during which time mysteries that inevitably arise about language and its growth and development yielded problems for which hypotheses were formulated, tested, and reformulated. In this on-going relationship among two linguists, dozens of students, and their teacher, the students and their teacher become linguistically literate, while the linguists become middle-school literate.