Bill Labov and Gillian Sankoff are visiting OSU February 28 through March 1. Among the many scheduled events, I am most excited about their talk on Friday, “What is to be learned?”, in which they will endeavor to answer the question: What are the data that the child attends to in the process of becoming a native speaker? The talk will be in Lazenby 21, 3:55-5:00 pm, reception to follow.
Month: February 2013
Nathaniel Dumas speaking at OSU on American Stuttering English
Dr. Nathaniel W. Dumas (Linguistics, UC Santa Barbara) comes to OSU at the end of February to give a public talk and to guest lectures in my Ethnography of Communication seminar and a seminar taught by Professor Maurice Stevens (Comparative Studies). Dr. Dumas’ talk is titled “This Guy Says I Should Talk Like That All the Time”: Subverting Competing Masculinities and Femininities in an American Stuttering English Comedienne’s Stand-Up Routine. The talk is Wednesday, February 27th, 3:30-5:30pm, University Hall, Room 347. Reception to follow. This event is sponsored by the Buckeye Language Network, Disability Studies, Diversity & Identity Studies Collective, and the Department of Comparative Studies, and the Department of Teaching and Learning Equity and Diversity Committee.
Work-in-progress session at NCTEAR 2013
OSU hosts NCTEAR this year. My Second Language and Literacy Lab (SL3) group have a work-in-progress session on Saturday, February 16, 1:45-3:15 in Arps 100. In our session, ‘Multiple Perspectives on Talk around Storybook Read-alouds in a Kindergarten Classroom’, we discuss our collaborative work on 23 read alouds 
recorded in a Kindergarten classroom in a charter school that serves primarily the children of Somali refugees who have resettled in Central Ohio. Sirad Shirdon, Se Jeong Yang, Tanti Sari, and Ani Pujiastuti will present their analyses, each having taken a different analytic approach to the read aloud data. We will then discuss our efforts to integrate these different insights into read alouds as key sites for constructing meaning and developing cultural/linguistic minority children’s familiarity and facility with English language and literacy practices.