- Distinguished Guest Lecture Series
- K-12 Professional Development
Distinguished Guest Lecture Series
Fall Semester 2008 Series
Thursday, September 18, 3:30, Kiva Auditorium
Dr. Rod Ellis
"A Typology of Written Corrective Feedback Options"
Abstract:
This talk will examine the various options (both familiar and less familiar) for correcting students' written work. It will focus on just one kind of correction - the correction of linguistic errors – and consider studies that have examined the different options by way of illustrating how they have been investigated and the limitations in the research to date. The talk will argue that identifying the options in a systematic way is essential for both determining whether written corrective feedback is effective and, if it is,what kind of corrective feedback is most effective.Bio:
E-mail: r.ellis@auckland.ac.nz
Wednesday, October 22, 3:30 Tuttleman 300AB
Dr. Gigliana Melzi, New York University
"Cultural Variations in Maternal Discourse across Narrative Contexts"
Abstract:
Scholars and thinkers throughout the ages have conceptualized and analyzed narratives from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Within the field of developmental psychology, narrative is defined as a genre of oral discourse that characterizes and facilitates culturally determined ways of communicating lived or imaginary events to others. Early parent-child conversations are integral to the development of the skills needed to construct and share narrative text, both oral and written. This talk will present a study which compared the mother-child narratives of Spanish-speaking Latin American and English-speaking U.S American dyads produced in two narrative contexts: one which highlighted the child’s role as a narrator (conversational narratives about the past), and the other the mother’s role as a narrator (book sharing).
Bio:
Dr. Melzi is Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She obtained her doctoral degree from Boston University. Dr. Melzi’s research focuses on early literacy and language development of Spanish-speaking Latino children living in the United States and in their countries of origin. Currently, Dr. Melzi is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Administration for Children, Youth and Families (ACYF) for her work on educational involvement of Latino Head Start families.
E-mail: gigliana.melzi@nyu.edu
Wednesday, November 12, 3:30 Tuttleman 300AB
Erin Kearney, University of Pennsylvania
"A Narrative Approach to Teaching Culture in the Foreign Language Classroom"
Abstract:
Recent years have brought a great deal of attention to the cultural dimensions of foreign language education. Theoretical models of the process of culture learning abound, and professional organizations like the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and the Modern Language Association have emphasized the central role of culture in foreign language instruction. Despite extensive theorizing and discussion within professional organizations, however, very little classroom-based empirical research has been conducted in order to investigate the process of culture learning as it already occurs in real classrooms. Given this state of affairs, numerous questions might be addressed, but in my study of a university-level French course at a U.S. university, I began with the very broad question: What is the nature of culture learning for this group of learners and their teacher? In this ethnographic and discourse-analytic study, I was able to investigate what culture learning means from the perspective of those who engage in it and to study the fine detail of classroom discourse and interaction that supported successful culture learning. While many interactional mechanisms and routines contributed to students’ learning about culture, it is the overarching pedagogical approach employed in the class that I take up in this presentation. First I describe what I have characterized as the “narrative” approach to the teaching of culture that was present in the class I studied. Then, by presenting extracts from classroom interaction and from student work, I demonstrate how this narrative approach functioned to support students in their attempt to make sense of culture. I conclude by discussing how the narrative approach apparent in the classroom I studied might inform theory and practice in other contexts.
Bio:
Erin Kearney recently received her PhD in Educational Linguistics from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. An instructor of various levels of university French courses for the past seven years, Erin’s research has developed out of her own teaching experiences, and her interests include the cultural dimensions of foreign language education, classroom discourse and interaction, learner narratives of language learning experiences, teacher education, and action research.
E-mail: erin3@dolphin.upenn.edu
Spring Semester 2008 Series
Thursday, January 31, 3:30
Dr. Fabienne Doucet, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University
"Language, Identity Status, and the Authenticity Question among Haitian Immigrant Youth"
Abstract:
In Haiti, whether one speaks French is an immediate marker for social status. Although
French was the country’s only official language until the late 1980s, folk wisdom had it that in Haiti, 100% of the population spoke Creole (Kreyol), while only 20% spoke French. This history sets an important backdrop for understanding the complexities surrounding language use among Haitians living in the United States. In this presentation, I outline the contours of identity formation among Haiti-born (1.5-generation) and U.S.-born (2nd generation) youth as played out on the stage of U.S. schools. In particular, I focus on how students used language to align themselves politically and socially, to judge the extent of their peers’ “authenticity” at Haitians, and to negotiate their own internal identity-forming processes. Data for this presentation come from an ethnographic study I conducted in Boston and Cambridge, MA under the umbrella of the Harvard Immigration Projects.
Bio:Dr. Fabienne Doucet is an Assistant Professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development (New York University). She studies family, school, and community partnerships, parental values and beliefs about education, and the schooling experiences of immigrant and U.S.-born children of color. From 2000-2002, she was a National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Under the umbrella of the Harvard Immigration Projects, she conducted a study of the way values and beliefs about academic achievement are communicated between Haitian immigrant parents and children, and how this process affects the children's academic engagement. In 2003, she was awarded a National Academy of Education/Spencer Fellowship to work on a book manuscript based on this research. She earned a doctorate in human development and family studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2000.
February 21, 3:30
Dr. Lorena Llosa, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University
"Validating a standards-based classroom assessment of English proficiency based on teacher judgments"
Abstract:
Using Bachman's (2005) validation framework, this study investigates validity issues related to the use of the ELD Classroom Assessment, a standards-based classroom assessment of English proficiency used in a large urban school district in California. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which scores assigned by teachers on the ELD Classroom Assessment can be interpreted as indicators of English proficiency as defined by the California ELD standards. Two different research approaches were employed to investigate the validity of the inferences drawn from the ELD Classroom Assessment: 1) examining the assessment in relation to another measure of the same ability-the California English Language Development Test (CELDT)-using confirmatory factor analysis of multitrait-multimethod data; and 2) examining the processes teachers engaged in while scoring the classroom assessment using verbal protocol analysis.
The findings of the quantitative study suggest that the ELD Classroom Assessment does measure the aspects of English proficiency it claims to measure. The findings of the verbal protocol analysis, however, indicate that factors other than a student's English proficiency are also reflected in the scores assigned by the teachers. These seemingly contradictory findings will be explained and discussed in terms of their implications for the use of standards-based classroom assessments within a high-stakes accountability system.
Bio:
Dr. Lorena Llosa is an Assistant Professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development (New York University). She received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work focuses on second and foreign language teaching and learning, language testing, program evaluation, and research methods. Prior to NYU, she worked as a research analyst for the Los Angeles Unified School District where she directed a large scale evaluation of a computer-based literacy program. She also served as a research analyst at the Center for the Study of Evaluation/CRESST at UCLA where she worked on the development of performance assessments in English and Spanish. The work she will present for the Language and Linguistics Speaker Series was funded by a Spencer Dissertation Grant and a UC Linguistic Minority Research Institute Grant and was awarded the AERA Division H Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2006.
Fall Semester 2007 Series
Wednesday, October 31, 3:30pm, Kiva Auditorium
Dr. Amanda Brown, Syracuse University
"Gesture: A Unique Window on Second Language Acquisition"
Abstract: Gestures are symbolic movements that speakers perfom during the course of interaction. Through intricate temporal semantic alignment with speech, the two modalities form one integrated, expressive system. Gullberg (2006) outlines three ways in which the study of gesture is relevant to issues in second language acquisition. First, as gestures are part of the communicative message, they serve as input to language learners. Second, with crosscultural and crosslinguistic variation, gestures constitute part of the target lagnauge that must be acquired. Finally, as a unique window on the mind (McNeill, 1992), gestures have much to tell us about the processes underlying second language acquisition. In this talk, Dr. Brown illustrates the methodological contribution by demonstrating how gesture analyses can reveal bi-directional interactions between linguistic systems within the multilingual mind.
Dr. Amanda Brown is Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. Her PhD is jointly from Boston University and the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics. Her research interests broadly deal with how lanugages interact within the multilingual mind, focusing particularly how the first language is affected by acquisition of a second language. In addition to traditional analyses of speech production, she exploits gesture methodologies to address these issues.
Spring Semester 2007 Series
Wednesday, March 21, 3:30pm, Tuttleman 303AB
Dr. Ferenc Bunta, Communication Sciences, Temple University
"Analyzing bilingual phonology: Methods, techniques, and selected results"
Abstract: Bilingual phonological acquisition is a complex process, and this complexity is reflected by the variety of approaches that have been used to analyze it. In this presentation, a wide array of analytical approaches and methods used to shed light on bilingual phonological acquisition are illustrated and discussed. The approaches presented in this talk are eclectic, reflecting the complex challenges that warrant them and mirroring the diversity of bilingual language learners faced with the task of acquiring different phonological systems.
The talk will begin with the discussion of more traditional approaches to bilingual phonological acquisition, such as phonological feature, segmental, syllable structure, and error analyses. These approaches are still the most prominent in bilingual phonological acquisition and have been very instrumental in revealing patterns of phonological development. Nevertheless, the complexity of phonological acquisition requires other approaches to be incorporated into bilingual phonological analyses that have been either more marginalized or have only recently become available as compared to more mainstream methods of analysis. Phonological whole-word analyses have recently gained more popularity and are very promising in investigating bilingual phonological acquisition. Acoustic analyses and speech perception-based approaches also hold great promise for better understanding phonological acquisition in bilingual children.
Each approach will be presented and examples will be provided, promoting the use of a multi-pronged approach to analyzing bilingual phonological acquisition, because such a complex phenomenon demands the use of a variety of approaches and methods to maximize our ability to better understand it.
Thursday, March 22, 1:10 – 2:30pm, Tuttleman 101
Dr. Stanley Whitley, Wake Forest University
" Error analysis versus the canon"
Friday, March 23, 1:00 – 2:30, Tuttleman 303AB
Dr. Stanley Whitley, Wake Forest University
" Contrastive analysis versus the canon"
Wednesday, April 4th, 3:30pm, Tuttleman 303AB
Susan Strauss, Pennsylvania State University
"Meaning—the essence of grammar, the core of pragmatics: A cross-linguistic, cross-cultural illustration using Korean, Japanese, and American English"
In this talk, I demonstrate the inextricable interconnectedness between meaning and grammar / pragmatics. In contrast with traditional accounts of grammar which are typically based on static “rules” of language use, I introduce an approach to grammatical analysis derived from alternative types of rules—rules that are inferable by discursive patterns and driven by contextual and conceptual meaning. The talk will present examples from Korean, Japanese, and American English and will appeal to a range of linguistic data, from invented examples to actual language use. The latter category will include excerpts from both written and oral modalities—including TV commercials, print ads, food packages, and television/movie clips.
Through the use of these stretches of discourse, I address potentially alternating forms in all three languages—e.g., English: any vs. some and plural vs. singular verb morphology, with apparent mismatches in subject-verb agreement; Japanese: existential verbs aru and iru (veering away from the traditional view of ‘animacy’); Japanese and Korean: verbs of visual perception (J: mieru vs. dete kuru. K: poita vs. naota) and their relationship to concepts of definiteness and expectedness. For Korean, we will also examine the notion of “honorific” verb morphology from the viewpoints of traditional accounts and actual language use—as a means of contrasting the “static” rule-driven approach with a dynamic, meaning-driven one. Some concepts underlying Korean honorific verb morphology may be applicable to Japanese and other foreign languages.
The approach will mirror much of what I call Conceptual Grammar (Strauss 2006 and Strauss, Lee, and Ahn 2006), which is intended as a pedagogical tool to raise language teachers’ and learners’ awareness of the intricacies of language use and to consider grammar as a fun, dynamic and meaning-driven phenomenon.
Wednesday, April 18, 3:30pm, 1221 Anderson Hall
Dr. Shuhan Wang
" The Chinese Case in the US: Planning Language Education, Building Societal Capital"
Being framed as an economic competitiveness and national security issue, the study of Chinese language in the U.S. has recently received unprecedented attention that presents both an opportunity and challenge to the Chinese language teaching field and educational systems. This paper builds on the language planning framework advanced by Joshua A. Fishman and takes a language ecological perspective to examine the Chinese case in the US. In addition to suggesting strategies to build the infrastructure of the Chinese field, the paper proposes the notion of biliteracy in the dominant and heritage/second Discourses as human, cultural, and social capital for individuals, groups, and the society-at-large. As cultural capital, biliteracy Discourses enable individuals, communities and societies to connect to the past and future generations. As human and social capital, biliteracy Discourses empower them to move forward into the future.
Fall Semester 2006 Series
Wednesday, November 1, Tuttleman 303 AB
Dr. Suzanne Wertheim, University of Maryland
Institutional and individual uses of language for nation building in Tatarstan
When members of a minority group feel that their integrity is threatened by incursions from a dominant group, one response can be the creation of an “oppositional identity,” where the minority identity is defined as much by what it is not as by what it is. Many Tatars in post-Soviet Tatarstan have a sense of oppositional identity in which being Tatar explicitly means not being Russian. Language is a prominent subject in their anti-assimilationist and nation-building discourse, and Russian language and culture are the targets of post-Soviet Tatar purification movements. These purification movements, including top-down language engineering, are informed by prevalent language ideologies that often equate language and nation, and that privilege a maximally de-Russified standard Tatar language (which can be interpreted as an iconic representative of a de-Russified Tatar nation). Tatar nationalists also engage in certain forms of linguistic practice that are used to create a socio-cultural identity that is in opposition to the Russian majority; and these linguistic practices, together with the post-Soviet purification movements, are affecting the structure of the Tatar language.
Wednesday, November 1, Ritter Hall 211
Dr. Aneta Pavlenko, College of Education
Language policies and politices in the post-Soviet countries
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the leadership of the fourteen post-Soviet countries had to come to terms with the results of the Russification policy and to formulate new language and education policies. Interestingly and in some ways unexpectedly, countries with similar demographic makeups have chosen dramatically different ways to proceed, from adopting Russian as a main official language (Belarus) to discarding Russian, even as a minority language, and refusing citizenship to those who do not speak the local language (Estonia, Latvia). This presentation will point to the sources of these divergent decisions and draw parallels to language and education policies in the United States
Tuesday, November 7 , 3:30pm, Tuttleman 101
Anne Pomerantz, University of Pennsylvania
“Señora, boys just cannot speak Spanish”: Deconstructing the notion of female superiority in foreign language classrooms
Adopting a feminist poststructuralist framework, many applied linguists have begun to question how gender, understood as a system of social relations and practices, might mediate additional language learning. From studies of gender as factor in enabling or constraining one’s access to language learning opportunities to detailed accounts of how learners construct and negotiate gendered identities in new communities of practice, such work has foregrounded the many ways in which gender is implicated in L2 learning both in and out of the classroom. For researchers, policy makers and teachers concerned with foreign language (FL) learning, one recent finding from this line of inquiry is particularly vexing. Namely, why is classroom FL learning, at least in major Anglophone countries, overwhelmingly viewed as a female endeavor? As Carr and Pauwels (2006) report, research undertaken in both Australia and England on attitudes of secondary school students toward FL study reveals one widely held assumption: “real boys don’t do languages.” What effects does this pervasive ideology have with respect to the promotion, organization, realization, and outcome of school-sanctioned FL learning in such countries?
In this presentation, I take up the issue of the feminization of FL learning again, but with a focus on students at a US university studying Spanish. While previous work has documented and questioned the prevalence of ideologies that posit females as superior FL learners and FL learning as a fundamentally “girlish” pursuit in secondary school settings, the present paper examines how these and other such ideologies of gender are constructed and negotiated in the course of doing FL learning in a college context. Specifically, I describe how learners in an advanced Spanish conversation course positioned themselves and others in ways that both reproduced and challenged the associations between being female and being a good language learner/good language student that circulated within and through their classroom. Moreover, I consider the implications of these acts of positioning for both learners’ classroom identities (gender and other) and our overall understanding of their linguistic expertise.
Wednesday, November 29, Tuttleman 303AB
Jennifer Cromley, Lindsey Snyder, and Ulana Luciw, Psychological
Studies in Education, College of Education
“Psychotic” T cells and antigens: Word reading, vocabulary, and
comprehension of science text
Undergraduate students typically decode their texts accurately. Some texts, however, pose many challenges for accurate word reading, even for undergraduate students. We collected think-aloud protocols from 97 students in an introductory biology course for life science majors while they read from their own textbook. In this study, we analyze the relationships among students’’ ability to pronounce difficult words (e.g., cytotoxic T cells), their understanding of the meanings of vocabulary in the text, and the contribution of these variables to comprehending the text. We consider which word reading errors are most likely to affect comprehension, including the effect of missing etymological and morphological cues in words.
Spring Semester 2006 Series
Monday, February 27,3:00pm, Kiva Auditorium
Prof. Stephen May, University of Waikato, New Zealand
"Language Teaching and Language Rights: Making Some Connections"
This presentation explores the links between language rights and language teaching. It addresses the following key questions: Why are language rights important for language teachers and other educationalists? What are the implications of language rights for language teaching, and research on language teaching?
Stephen May is Foundation Professor and Chair of Language and Literacy Education, and Research Professor in the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research, School of Education, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. He is also a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, Sociology Department, University of Bristol, UK.
Wednesday, March 22, 3:00pm, Walk Auditorium
Margaret Van Naerssen, Immaculata University
"Forensic Linguistics: Can Words Help Solve the Crime?"
In a love triangle one man kills his rival, then flees the country, leaving his girlfriend behind. If the girlfriend doesn't speak English and there is no audio recording of the Spanish used in the police interview, can the transcript of the English interpretation be used to help show whether she conspired in the murder? To help solve this and other compelling cases, forensic linguists use their expertise in the science of language and its interaction with the law. Using real civil and criminal cases as examples, Dr. Margaret van Naerssen shares how linguists can assist law enforcement officers, attorneys, and the court in their work by analyzing both written and spoken words. Dr. van Naerssen is on the faculty at Immaculata University and is an expert consultant/witness in forensic linguistics.
Wednesday, April 12th, Kiva Auditorium
Susan Strauss, Pennsylvania State University
"Dynamizing grammar: A renewed look at authentic discourse as a pedagogical resource for semantics, pragmatics, and conceptual schemata"
In this talk, I propose a non-traditional perspective on grammatical analysis in English (and other languages, e.g. Japanese and Korean) through the use of authentic instances of spoken and written discourse. I view “grammar” as the crux of all discourse—as a dynamic communicative system in which speaker/writer choice of form encodes elements of personal and interactional stance, cognition, and social acts (e.g., agreeing; disagreeing; affiliating; disaffiliating; expressing surprise, empathy, counter-expectation, agency, etc.). I will focus particularly on reference, tense/aspect marking, subject-verb agreement, voice, and questions and question-like structures. To illustrate this dynamic view of grammar, I appeal to transcribed excerpts from television (e.g., The Weather Channel, The O’Reilly Factor, Christina Cooks, soap operas, and commercials) and movies, as well as a variety of written data, including professional essays and newspaper articles. I hope to generate discussions surrounding the applicability of the overall approach in the second/foreign language classroom.
Friday, April 21st, 3:00pm, 303AB, Tuttleman Hall
Celeste Kinginger
Language Learning in Study Abroad: Case Studies of Americans in France
In the research on language learning in study abroad, studies frequently document the significance or enhanced impact of individual differences in achievement; these differences are either left unexplained or ascribed to motivational deficits or other affective variables. The goal of this talk is to explore the value of explicit focus on the uniqueness of individual motives, experiences, and outcomes, following the poststructuralist realization that learning is a socially and historically situated human activity involving people who may accommodate or contest the practices they encounter. Three cases are selected from a larger research project involving 23 American undergraduate students on a semester-long sojourn in France. The project combines narrative study of interview and journal data with traditional assessment of growth in language proficiency and non-traditional assessment of developing language awareness. Through attention to the particular features of each student's desires and experiences, the cases suggest that the autonomous, self-directed achiever portrayed in many accounts of study abroad is a fictional character, shaped by the hopeful voluntarism of American educational research and, more broadly, by western views on the metaphysical independence of the self.
Fall Semester 2005 Series
Thursday, September 29, 3:30pm, Kiva Auditorium
Prof. Mehmet Yava, Department of Linguistics, Florida International University
"Markedness and Second Language Phonology"
Discussion of the effects of markedness in the learning of a second language phonology with reference to specific phenomena such as final devoicing, and aspiration and/or cluster simplification, and their implications for teaching/remediation.
Wednesday, October 12, 3:00pm, Kiva Auditorium
Dr. Ingrid Pillar, University of Basel, Switzerland
"The Source of My Courage: ESL Users' Accounts of Their Success in Language Learning"
Abstract : In my talk I examine narratives of success or failure in language learning. The data for this paper come from a longitudinal ethnographic project with 45 ESL users in Sydney , Australia , from a variety of linguistic, national and ethnic backgrounds. I will focus on the interplay between societal ideologies that de/valorize diversity with the ways in which ESL users' success is mediated by their understandings of the ethnic and racial identity of Australian society. It emerges that those who see themselves as highly successful ESL learners draw upon discourses of multiculturalism, and Australia as a diverse society to a significant extent. By contrast, those who see themselves as unsuccessful ESL learners, either did not know about such discourses or discarded them. Instead, they regard Australia as a White Anglo-Saxon society to which they do not have access. In the conclusion I will suggest ways to re-conceptualize the notion of 'success' in language learning as a "members' category".
Friday, October 28, 3:00pm, Tuttleman 105
Dr. Robert Schrauf, Pennsylvania State University
"How Old is Too Old to Learn A Second Language?"
Most SLA texts do not envision classrooms filled with retirees over age 65, yet it is not uncommon for senior centers to sponsor language classes as one of their activities. Can older adults learn a second language? What difficulties might they encounter? What particular abilities might make them better students than the typical college student? Very little formal research has addressed these issues. In this presentation, I will show how current findings on language processing and cognitive aging help articulate possible answers to these questions and suggest how we might help older adults to attain the second language proficiency of which they are capable.
Friday, November 4, 3:00pm, Tuttleman 105
Dr. Nancy Bell, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
"Bilingual Women's Humorous Narratives: Topic and Function"
Humor can present an intimidating linguistic and cultural challenge for L2 speakers, yet it is a crucial means by which friendships are developed. This presentation shows how the humorous narratives constructed by four bilingual women differed from those described in studies of L1 women's humor and narratives. In particular, there was an the overall pattern of positive portrayal of the narrator. It is suggested that the telling of overtly or implicitly self-aggrandizing stories may have been a way for these women to deal with the marginalization that many L2 speakers experience, simply as a function of their non-native speaker status.