AAAL 2012 Presentations

Two Ph.D. students will be presenting at the AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistcs) 2012 Conference in Boston, March 24-27. Carrie Bonilla will present a paper entitled "Processability Theory in L2 Spanish: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of an Oral Corpus"; Jie Cui will be presenting her work "Adopting Kinship Address Terms in Chinese E-Commerce".

Dr. Kiesling at IRWG Panel

Dr. Scott Kiesling will participate in a panel discussion entitled "Gender and Sexuality: What's Language Got to Do with it?" at the Institute for Research on Women & Gender (IRWG), University of Michigan.

Presentation at the Fifth Summit on Communication and Sport

PhD student Fawn Draucker will present a paper on participation frameworks in social media at the Fifth Summit on Communication and Sport to be held in Peoria, IL, March 29-31, 2012. Her paper is entitled "Interaction and participation frameworks in the NHL's use of Twitter".

Colloquium Series

This Friday, Dr. David Wible of National Central University in Taiwan will give the first colloquium talk of this semester. His talk is entitled "Where Grammars Leak and Dictionaries Burst: Capturing Multiword Expressions for Language Research and Pedagogy".

Grad Student to Present at GURT 2012

Jing Wang is presenting a poster entitled "The development of third person singular present form –s: verb semantics or input frequency?" (co-authored with Yas Shirai) at the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2012 (GURT 2012).

Faculty Member Elected to CEA Commission

M. Christine O'Neill, an English Language Institute administrative faculty member, has been elected to the 2012-2014 CEA Commission. CEA, which stands for the Commission on English Language Program Accreditation, specializes in accrediting English language programs and institutions worldwide.

Faculty Member Appointed as Incoming Chair of TESOL PDC

Dr. Dawn E. McCormick, an English Language Institute administrative faculty member and the TESOL Certificate Advisor, has been appointed as Incoming Chair of the Professional Development Committee, a standing committee of TESOL International Association.

Faculty Presents at Ilse Lehiste Memorial Symposium

Marta Ortega-Llebaria, in collaboration with Professor Laura Bosch from University of Barcelona, presented the paper "Cross-dialect versus Cross-language Discrimination in Early Infancy: A Look at Rhythmic and Segmental Properties" at the Ilse Lehiste Memorial Symposium held on November 11-12 at Ohio State University.

Presentation at Georgetown University Round Table

Charlotte Rogers, under the supervision of Marta Ortega-Llebaria, got her paper "From Lexical Tone to Sentence Intonation: Training Mandarin Speakers of English" accepted for presentation at the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2012 (GURT 2012)

Presentations by Hispanic Linguistics Students and Faculty

In October, Meghan Dabkowski, Maria Laura Lenardon and Dr. Marta Ortega-Llebaria presented a poster "Investigating Vowel Length in Cordoba Spanish" at the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium 2011 at the University of Georgia. In July, Maria Laura Lenardon, Carrie Bonilla and Nausica Marcos Miguel gave a conference presentation "Consciousness Raising Tasks in L2 Spanish Instruction" at the AATSP (The American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese) 93rd Annual Conference in Washington, DC.

Publication in Hispania

Carrie L Bonilla, a PhD candidate in Hispanic Linguistics, published an article in Hispania entitled "The Conversational Historical Present in Oral Spanish Narratives".

SLRF 2011 Presentations

Two conference presentations were made by Pitt linguists at the SLRF (Second Language Research Forum) 2011 held at the Iowa State University. Katherine I. Martin & Alan Juffs presented their study entitled "Reading in English: A Comparison of Native Arabic, Native Chinese, and Native English Speakers". Jing Wang & Keiko Koda presented their study entitled "Does Partial Radical Information Help in the Learning of Chinese Characters".

Ling Graduate Publishes in Second Language Research

Willie Costello, former undergraduate major in linguistics and philosophy, published a paper in Second Language Research entitled "The Aspect Hypothesis, defective tense and obligatory contexts: Comments on Haznedar", 2007. (Costello & Shirai, 2011). This paper was written while he was taking Directed Research with Dr. Shirai under the Arts & Sciences program First Experience in Research. Currently he is a graduate student at the University of Toronto.

Invited Talks by Dr. Shirai

Dr. Yasuhiro Shirai will give invited talks at Temple University, Japan under the Distinguished Lecturer Series on the topic "Second Language Acquisition Research and Language Teaching: A Functionalist Approach" on December 10 and 11 in Tokyo, and December 17 and 18 in Osaka.

Dr. Shirai to Give a Talk at Williams College

Dr. Yasuhiro Shirai will give an invited talk entitled Second Language Acquisition Research and Second/Foreign Language Teaching at the Center for Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Williams College, on Nov. 14.

Presentation at LPTS Conference

PhD student Lauren Collister will present her work on multimodality in digital games at the Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Approaches to Text Structuring (LPTS) conference, November 16-18 in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. The title of her presentation is "Spoken and Written Linguistic Modes in Online Gaming".

Department to Co-Host SLRF

The University of Pittsburgh, together with Carnegie Mellon University, has been selected to host SLRF (Second Language Research Forum) on October 18-21, 2012. A group of students from the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology at Pitt, as well as the Department of Modern Languages at CMU, worked for over a year to prepare a bid to host the conference, which is organized by graduate students. Congratulations to the organizing committee, and we hope to see everyone in Pittsburgh in 2012!