SLAT COURSES FALL 2008

CLICK HERE FOR THE COMPLETE FALL 2008 COURSE LIST(in PDF)

Please check the following updates as you plan your fall schedule!

Last updated on May, 1st, 2008

Updates:

1. From Dr. Jones:

"The instructor for Engl 562, Doug Adamson, says that it will not be appropriate for SLAT students in the fall. He says he teaches it concurrently with 462, and that it is basically an undergraduate level course. So if you are interested in this course, you will need to wait until a semester in which it is taught as a grad-only course. Please strike it from the course list I just sent around." (3/26/08)

 

2. From Dr. Jones:

"Here is another late-breaking addition to the Fall 08 course list. Depending on the sorts of topics you work on for the course, this could count for either Pedagogy or Use. (Please confer with either Dr. Fielder or Dr. Dupuy to talk about how you could make it fit your particular program.)"

***NEW COURSE FOR FALL 2008***

Engl 596o Corpus Linguistics & Language Teaching

T 3:30-6:00 Modern Languages Bldg 412 (COH lab)

Jonathan Reinhardt

In this course we will explore the growing impact of corpus-informed approaches on second/foreign language
teaching and second language acquisition research. Course readings will introduce corpus linguistics and
examine studies using corpus analytic methodology in conjunction with a variety of language and learning
theories, including register, genre and sociocultural theory. Course participants will conduct investigations and design corpus-informed pedagogical interventions based on their own needs and interests, through exploration of native-speaker and learner corpora of written and spoken English and other languages as available.
(3/28/08)

 

3. From Dr. Jones:

" Here is another addition to the Fall 08 SLAT course list. This course could count under Group B for Processes majors and minors. "

LING/PSYCH 409/509 -- The Psycholinguistics of Writing Systems (3 units):

Thomas Bever

This course reviews how cognitive, language and social processes influence the world's writing systems. There are two main foci: (1) The influence of written and spoken language comprehension and production on writing systems; (2) Presentations by experts on various systems, including American Sign Language, Arabic, Chinese, Hmong, Indonesian, Japanese, Navajo. The course embraces a wide range of approaches with guest lectures on ancient creation of writing, biliteracy, eye-movements & vision, history of the English alphabet, literacy development, lexical representation, miscue analysis, neurology of reading, and modern printing techniques. A preliminary syllabus is available from Tom Bever (tgb@u.arizona.edu).

The first meeting will occur on the first Tuesday of the fall term, at 5:00pm. The meeting time can be changed by mutual agreement. Anyone interested in the course who cannot attend the first meeting should contact Tom Bever. Note: the course may still appear in the catalogue as meeting on thursday, but it will be moved to tuesday at 5:pm at a location tba. (3/28/08)

 

4. Another addition:

The following new course, taught by Kerri Russell, should appear soon on the schedule of classes for Fall 2008. The class will meet on Tuesdays from 2:00 until 4:30. (SLAT students, this course should count for an Analysis major or minor.)

JPN 596c – Topics in Japanese Linguistics: Language Change and Development

Disclaimer: Despite the word "Japanese" in the title of the course, knowledge of the Japanese language is not required. This course will include discussions of Japonic, Indo-European, Austronesian, Manchu- Tungusic, and any other language families that we feel like discussing.

Course description: This course will introduce the theoretical and methodological issues related to the field of historical linguistics. We will discuss a variety of topics, including reconstruction of pre- and proto-languages, the genetic relationship of languages, glottochronology, contact linguistics, and typology. Students in this course will research language change in a language/ language family (or languages/language families) of their choosing. (3/28/08)

 

5. Another addition:

696C SMR 6: Course Subtitle: Statistics in Higher Education (Wednesday, 4pm-6:30pm, Educ455 by Rios-Aguilar

This Fall 08 course is an additional option that can meet the core requirement in statistics. (From Kim, 4/14/08)

 

6. Another new course: Ling 696b, Monday 2-4:30pm by Natasha Warner.

The seminar Ling. 696b in the fall will be on fast, reduced, casual, conversational (whatever you'd prefer to call it) speech. The vast majority of language research looks at careful speech, and how people are expected to
say things. When we look at more natural, faster speech, we often find that people don't talk the way we expect them to at all: they delete sounds, syllables, and whole words even, and yet as long as we listen to it in
context, this sounds just fine! A well-known example is "jeet yet?" for "Did you eat yet," but we also find things like "s(u)s" for "supposed to s(ee)." If you listen to just the reduced part out of context, you can't understand it at all, but if you listen to it in context, it sounds perfectly natural. As listeners, how do we understand speech like
this? Reduced, natural speech is becoming a very hot topic in phonetics right now, so this is a good time to study this.

Note about requirements: if you're concerned about making progress on your prelim or dissertation but would like to take this seminar, I will be happy to arrange that the term paper can be identical to your prelim or a chapter of your dissertation. The additional requirement might be a 1-2 paragraph statement of some way that your research area could relate to reduction. That is, if progress toward degree would prevent you from taking the seminar, you will not need to do a separate project and paper for the class.

The topic interfaces with quite a few other fields:

- SLAT: Understanding reduced speech is much harder in a different dialect
or a second language. How do L2 learners acquire reduction?

- Ling. Anth. and discourse: Speech reduction varies with formality of the
speech style and relationship between the speakers, as well as with
given/new information.

- L1 acquisition: How do kids acquire careful forms of words despite hearing
reduced forms? How do kids reduce in their own speech?

- Computational ling.: How can we use large corpora and automatic analysis
of them to figure out how people reduce? What does reduction do to
automatic speech recognition?

- Formal phonology: How can we model reduced surface forms in a formal
phonological system? Should reduction be included in such a theory?

- Psycholinguistics: How do we do spoken word recognition when so little of
the expected lexical form is left, and so many surface forms are possible
for one word?

If you have an area you would like to relate to reduction that's not on this list, I'll be happy to do so, within the seminar! (For example, I wonder whether syntactic structure influences reduction, beyond what's caused by
given/new information and intonation?) The seminar is scheduled for Mondays 2-4:30. If you have any questions, let me know. (From Natasha Warner 4/24/08)

 

7. An additional course:

LING/PSYC 533:Theories of Language Development, Wed. 2-4:30, LouAnn Gerken
Here is the 2006 syllabus.
This is a Processes course in the group B category. (From Dr. Jones, posted 4/24/08)

 

8. One more addition: for the May presession. This could count as a group B course for
Pedagogy majors and minors.

The May intersession has a special doctoral seminar offering that you will not want to miss. Carole Edelsky has agreed to teach a seminar on what it means to take a critical perspective on language and education. Carole has been a faculty member of the Division of Curriculum and Instruction at Arizona State University for 31 years and has published many books and articles on issues of social justice, critical literacy, equity, democracy, language learning, and bilingual education. She is highly respected for her scholarly work and her willingness to live her beliefs through taking political action.

LRC 696a-031, A Critical Perspective on Language and Education
Carole Edelsky. May 19-30, 1:00-5:50 p.m.

This graduate course will focus on two major senses of “critical” as requiring, but not limited to, reflection and critique in regard to language and education. We will be critical in taking a socio-political, equity-centered perspective on particular topics such as second language acquisition, bilingual education, print literacy, whole language, language ideology in curriculum, and literacy testing. At the same time, we will look critically at earlier writings on similar topics, attending to historical changes in socio-political contexts and research/theory on those topics. Participants will begin by exploring meanings of a ‘critical perspective' and ‘critical practice' as discussed by Edelsky and Cherland, Gee, McLaren, B. Peterson, Shannon, and others. Those discussions will serve as lenses for an in-depth study of With Literacy and Justice for All: Rethinking the Social in Language and Education, 3rd edition . This is a text that self-consciously compares the current with earlier editions in order to foreground changes in views and understandings over time. Alongside the changes discussed in this text, participants will explore changes in their own thinking over time (even a short time) on a topic within the broad field of language and education. The primary course project will be a paper that revises one's earlier writing (that can be a paper for a course, a proposal for a grant, even an email-i.e., there is no requirement for having a large body of one's own writing) by both updating it and also re-conceptualizing it as a critical project.

FOR MORE INFORMATION EMAIL DR. CAROLE EDELSKEY edelsky@asu.edu

(posted 4/24/08)

9. Another: The instructor of Ed P 541 would welcome SLAT students in his course, so if you are looking for a statistics course, this is one that you could consider.