The pilot working group on Multimodality and/in Second Language Acquisition is bringing Marianne Gullberg (Lund University) to OSU to talk about her psycholinguistic research on gesture and language development. In her talk, ‘Why gestures are not (only) a compensatory device – evidence from language learners’, Prof Gullberg challenges the assumption that gestures are compensatory in nature and help speakers convey information they have difficulties expressing, facilitate lexical retrieval, and help speakers to solve cognitive problems. By looking at disfluencies and bimodal information structure in child and adult learner data, she shows that gestures are co-ordinated with fluent speech, not with disfluencies; that when gestures are recruited to compensate, different problems have different gestural solutions; and that children and adults generally express similar information bimodally. The working group is funded by the Humanities Institute and led by Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm and me. Prof Gullberg’s talk is Wednesday, April 2 from 4-6 at the Humanities Institute, 104 East 15th.
Month: March 2014
BETHA Grant
The Battelle Engineering, Technology and Human Affairs Endowment (BETHA) grant selection committee has awarded $59,985 to support ‘Engineering, Tech, Human Affairs and Social Justice: From Columbus to Colombia’. The project will build cross-cultural K-12 STEM outreach in Columbus and Bogotá and Pasto, Columbia. Kevin Passino (Electrical & Computer Engineering) is the PI, and the Co-investigators are Betty Lise Anderson (Electrical & Computer Engineering), John Clapp (Social Work), Melissa Wilson (Columbus Area Writing Project), and me.
Discourse Symposium at OSU
This 2-hour symposium examines the use and implementation of discourse across disciplinary and methodological boundaries. How does our understanding of ‘discourse’ influence our work and research? How might these differences help us to reach certain commonalities across disciplines? The symposium brings together OSU scholars to working in different disciplines (Conversation Analysis, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics and Folklore) to examine both how they understand the meaning of the ‘discourse’ as well as how they use ‘discourse’ in their own work. The featured speakers are Dr. Amy Shuman (English), Dr. Leslie C. Moore (Teaching and Learning), Dr. Scott Schwenter (Spanish and Portuguese), Dr. Lauren Squires (English), Dr. Pat Enciso (Teaching and Learning), Dr. David Bloome (Teaching and Learning), and Dr. Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm (Germanic Languages and Literatures). Monday, March 17th, 10 am to 12 pm in the Barbie Tootle Room, Ohio Union. For more information, contact Michael Furman furman.25@osu.edu