Department of Linguistics & TESOL | The University of Texas at Arlington
Home
Department News & Events
Spring Semester Information
Spring classes start on Tuesday, Jan 17. (Monday is the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday.)
Mavericks presenting at LSA
8 UTA faculty members and students--and one alumnus--will be presenting at the Linguistic Society of America and its affiliated organizations in January: (Ian Connally, Colleen Fitzgerald, Cindy Kilpatrick, Andrew McKenzie, Lori McLain Pierce, Joey Sabbagh, Ben Slade, Laurel Smith Stvan, Jeff Witzel). See you all in Portland!
Oct. 31 - Nov. 5: Endangered Languages Week
Read more about last semester's events at the Endangered Languages Week web page.
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.
Jason Kandybowicz and Benjamin Slade Join our Faculty this Fall
Dr. Jason Kandybowicz of Swarthmore College has accepted the tenure-track position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and TESOL. He brings additional expertise to our Department in the areas of African linguistics (especially Nupe, Twi and Krachi) and Theoretical Linguistics, specifically, syntax. Dr. Benjamin Slade has accepted the Senior Lecturer position. He brings expertise in Historical linguistics, Formal Semantics, Syntax, and structure of Indo-Aryan languages. Both Dr. Kandybowicz and Dr. Slade join us in Fall 2011.
Student News
In November, Heather Beal successfully defended her dissertation: “The Segments and Tones of Soyaltepec Mazatec.”
Two students from the department were initiated into the Phi Kappa Phi honor society this fall: Forest Ivey and Yujeong Choi.
Three of our graduate students recently received funding from the College of Liberal Arts: Vitaly Voinov, Dean’s Excellence Research Travel Award; Matt Benton, Dean’s Excellence Award for Graduate Research/Creative Activity; Sok-hun Kim, Dean’s Excellence Award for Graduate Research/Creative Activity.
Seven students from the Department of Linguistics & TESOL were honored as University Scholars at the 2011 President's Convocation for Academic Excellence: Heather Beal (PhD Ling), Sean Cooper (MA TESOL), Nathan Eversole (MA Ling), Michelle Maupin (MA Ling), Sharon Peters (MA TESOL), Kristopher Wright (MA TESOL), and Roberta 'Bobbi' Ansiaux (MA TESOL).
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 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.
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, Colleen 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.
Dr. Cynthia Kilpatrick, Lori McLain Pierce, and Justin Fuller will be presenting, "Focused Instruction: Syllabification and Diphthongization in Spanish" at the 2012 conference on Current Approaches to Spanish and Portuguese Second Language Phonology (CASPSLaP 2012), being held at the University of South Carolina in February.
Dr. Laurel Smith Stvan spent the summer as an invited researcher at the Centre for Advanced Research in English at the University of Birmingham in England. She also presented a paper at the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) in Boston in June, and presented a poster at the Corpus Linguistics 2011: Discourse and Corpus Linguistics conference in Birmingham in July. In February she'll present “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.
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.