Testing different versions of the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis in the classroom: an application of the Project-Based Learning Approach

Abstract

This article reports an academic experience that took place during the second academic semester of 2018, during the course Introduction to Linguistics, mandatory for the Undergraduate Course in Language at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). During part of the course, we implemented an activity inspired in the Project-Based Learning (PBL) method, to deal with an item of the syllabus: the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH). The SWH has two basic premises: (i) The language we speak and with which we think shapes the way we perceive the world; (ii) the existence of several language systems implies that people who think in different languages must perceive the world differently. Using the PBL framework, students set up an experiment involving 22 native speakers of Russian and Portuguese to verify the strong version of SWH. Although the experiment had a small number of participants and used basic methodology, its findings allowed us to observe that SWH's assumptions cannot be ruled out and deserve to remain in a research agenda that is interested in looking at linguistic phenomena in a more comprehensive and less dogmatic way.