Department of Linguistics & TESOL | The University of Texas at Arlington
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Department News & Events
Spring Semester Events
Congratulations to our newest graduates - BA in Linguistics: Jason Holt. MA in TESOL: Wendy Cooper, Stefani Goode, Derek Smith, Heather Song, and Kristopher Wright. MA in Linguistics: Derrick Jackman, Amanda Reed, Fadiah Qudah, and Dusti Samples. PhD in Linguistics: Ziwo Lama and K. Larry Rogers. See the video the College of Liberal Arts spring commencement that took place in the new College Park Center on May 12.
Mavericks presenting at LSA
8 UTA faculty members and students--and one alumnus--presented at the Linguistic Society of America and its affiliated organizations in Portland, Oregon in January: (Ian Connally, Colleen Fitzgerald, Cindy Kilpatrick, Andrew McKenzie, Lori McLain Pierce, Joey Sabbagh, Ben Slade, Laurel Smith Stvan, Jeff Witzel).
The Department Has Moved!
The Linguistics and TESOL Department's administrative office and those faculty offices that have been on the 4th floor of Hammond Hall relocated on November 9th to the 1st floor of Hammond. Stop by the new main office in 132 Hammond Hall.
Student News
Congratulations to our first BA graduate, Michael Mansbridge (BA Linguistics, 2011), who has been accepted to the Graduate Program in Comparative Studies of Language and Culture at Nagoya University for Fall 2012!
Two students successfully defended their dissertations in the spring semester: Ziwo Lama: "Subgrouping of Nisoic (Yi) Languages, a Phylogentic Estimation. (abstract)" and K. Larry Rogers: "American Sign Language Verb Categories in Constructed Action" (abstract).
Five students from the department were initiated into the Phi Kappa Phi honor society this year: JungAe Lee Allman, Yujeong Choi, Norma Ghanem, Forest Ivey and Carolyn Jones
This year saw the first recipients of two departmental endowments. Doctoral student Vitaly Voinov received the Edmondson Endowment Grant for his fieldwork this fall on the Tuvan language. And doctoral student Natalie Carter received the Lombard Alumni Endowment Grant to fund summer training in forensic linguistics.Faculty News
Dr. Jason Kandybowicz presented research on varieties of emphasis in the Nupe language at an invited workshop in Ghent, Belgium in September. In March he gave two talks at the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL 43) at Tulane University.
In September, Dr. Jerold Edmondson was recognized as a Professor Emeritus at UT Arlington.
Dr. David Silva and six students from his Research Methods class had an article published in American Speech on variant pronunciations of "Iraq". In October, Dr. Silva was nominated for an Alicia Wilkerson Smotherman Faculty Award for this work with graduate students.
Dr. Jeff Witzel and Dr. Naoko Witzel had a book chapter published on the processing of Japanese control sentences. In March Dr. Witzel and Michael Mansbridge (BA, 2011) presented a poster presentation on “Bind accessibility and online anaphora processing” at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.
Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald and Oklahoma University's Dr. Mary Linn were interviewed on KERA 90.1 's "Think" with Krys Boyd on the topics of the Oklahoma Breath of Life Project, Native American languages and language endangerment. (streaming audio). In September, Dr. Fitzgerald gave an invited talk at the University of California, Santa Barbara on "Community-Based Language Research: Case Studies from the American Southwest". She also gave two talks at conferences in Australia in December: "Investigating Connected Speech from Tohono O'odham Digitized Legacy Data," at the University of Melbourne, and "Service-Learning and Community-based Research with Indigenous Language Communities," at La Trobe University. She will be co-presenting with Phillip Miguel, of Tohono O’odham Community College, on the Mathiot Dictionary project at a conference hosted by the Tohono O’odham Nation.
Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick, Lori McLain Pierce, and Justin Fuller presented, "Focused Instruction: Syllabification and Diphthongization in Spanish" at the 2012 conference on Current Approaches to Spanish and Portuguese Second Language Phonology (CASPSLaP 2012), held at the University of South Carolina in February.
In February Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan presented “Take it with a Pinch of Salt: Polysemy in Vernacular Discussion of Salt” at the 7th Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Conference on Food Representation in Literature, Film and the Other Arts at UT San Antonio. This summer she will be a visting researcher at the University of Birmingham in the UK, as a recipient of a CARE Fellowship through the Center for Advanced Research in English. In July she'll also present a paper on "Metonymy-driven Polysemy in Health Discourse" at the Researching and Applying Metaphor conference at Lancaster University,
Dr. Joey Sabbagh presented a conference talk, "Word order and prosodic structure constraints in Tagalog," at the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association conference.
UT Arlington Alumni Career News
Congratulations to the following alumni: Dr. Kenneth Zuercher (Ph.D. Linguistics, 2009) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Advising and Academic Development at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirites; Dr. Ann Hui-Yen Wang (Ph.D. Linguistics, 2008) has accepted a position as a contract assistant professor in the Department of English at Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages in Taiwan; Anna Gann (MA, 2008) has accepted a position as an assistant professor of ESOL at Austin Community College in Austin; Sean Cooper (MA, 2011) has obtained a position as Senior Lecturer at Salisbury University in Maryland; Stephen George (MA, 2010) has been accepted to the PhD program in Higher Education at the University of North Texas; Adam Stein (MA, 2009) is starting the PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy at UT Arlington; Jeff Hobbie (MA, 2010) has accepted a full-time ESL teaching position in the Intensive English Program at Southern Methodist University.
Linguistics B.A. in the News
The department's new B.A. in Linguistics was recently featured in a Shorthorn article, in the College of Liberal Arts Newsroom, and the MavTrak Newsletter (3rd article). Read the degree requirements in the Undergraduate Catalog.
New Undergraduate Certificate in TESOL
Starting in Fall 2010, the Department of Linguistics and TESOL has begun offering a Certificate in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) available for students in an undergraduate program. Read more about the program at the TESOL Undergrad Certificate page.
More News & Events
Keep current with departmental announcements at our News & Events page.
Getting Oriented
Our faculty and students are often honored for their achievements. To learn more, go to our Student Accomplishments and Faculty News pages.
If you are interested in enrolling in one of our linguistics or TESOL programs, take a look at the Prospective Students page.
Our Current Students page provides links to essential information about scheduling, requirements, calendars, and diagnostic exams.