Plenary Speakers
Opening Plenary
Thelma Meléndez
Providing a World-Class Education For America’s English Learners
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
5:30 pm–7 pm
Dr. Meléndez will discuss the national vision for cradle-to-career education reform, including the federal blueprint to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, in the context of serving English learners. Highlights include the administration’s emphasis on innovation, accountability, and great teaching and learning; providing a world-class education for our diverse students; and strategies to serve English learners.
Thelma Meléndez is the assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education at the U.S. Department of Education; she earned her bachelor’s degree cum laude in sociology from the University of California at Los Angeles and her doctorate from the University of Southern California, where she specialized in language, literacy, and learning. She has served as superintendent of the Pomona Unified School District (Calif.) and has been recognized frequently for her educational leadership, including being named as an Outstanding K–12 School Leader & Distinguished Partner for Educational Excellence by California State Polytechnic University at Pomona in 2005 and as Outstanding Educator of the Year by the Los Angeles County Bilingual Directors Association in 2003.
James E. Alatis Plenary
Alastair Pennycook
Teaching English as Something Other Than Language
Thursday, March 17, 2011
8:30 am–9:30 am
English is an impossible idea. It is plural, fuzzy, unbounded, mixed, emergent, and indefinable. English can no longer be pinned down; it is a set of ideas, aspirations, desires, hopes, and threats. This plenary asks what it is we are involved in when we teach English.
Alastair Pennycook is professor of language studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. His interests include understanding language in relation to globalization, colonial history, identity, popular culture, politics, and pedagogy. Recent publications include Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (Routledge, 2007; winner of the BAAL Book Award in 2008) and two edited books, Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (with Sinfree Makoni; Multilingual Matters, 2007) and Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language (with Samy Alim and Awad Ibrahim; Routledge, 2009). His latest book is Language as a Local Practice (Routledge, 2010).
Jennifer Jenkins
English as a Lingua Franca: Challenging the “Standard”
Thursday, March 17, 2011
2:30 pm–3:30 pm
English as a lingua franca (ELF) has, in recent years, become established as a major international field of research whose findings question conventional assumptions about the nature of English. In this talk Dr. Jenkins will explore the global challenges presented by ELF and discuss their implications for English language policies and practices.
Jennifer Jenkins is professor of global Englishes at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. She first became interested in the phenomenon of ELF in the 1980s and researched it for her doctoral thesis. ELF is also the focus of most of her numerous books and articles, which have played a substantial role in establishing ELF internationally as a major field of enquiry. Professor Jenkins has also served on the advisory boards of many international journals and is one of three coeditors who will be launching the new Journal of English as a Lingua Franca (de Gruyter Mouton) later this year.
James R. Martin and Christian Matthiessen
Modelling and Mentoring: Teaching and Learning From Home Through School
Friday, March 18, 2011
8:30 am–9:30 am
Adopting a longitudinal perspective on teaching and learning language from home through school to working life, Martin and Matthiessen bring out the inherent complementarity of teaching and learning processes, showing how parents and teachers serve as mentors for learners by modelling meaning for them in dialogic interaction.
James R. Martin is professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, discourse semantics, register, genre, multimodality, and critical discourse analysis, focusing on English and Tagalog, with special reference to the transdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics, forensic linguistics, and social semiotics. Recent publications include The Language of Evaluation (with Peter White; Palgrave 2005); Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy (Edited with Fran Christie; Continuum, 2007); a second edition of Working with Discourse (with David Rose; Continuum, 2007); and a book on genre titled Genre Relations: Mapping Culture (Equinox, 2008).
Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen is chair professor and head of the department of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Matthiessen has been involved in major text-based research projects informed by systemic functional linguistics since 1980. His research has covered a wide range of areas including analysis of many kinds of discourse, register analysis and description, the development of rhetorical structure theory, the description of English and other languages spoken around the world, language typology and comparison, translation studies, "institutional linguistics," computational linguistics, the evolution of language, and systemic functional theory.
Presidential Plenary
Tracey Derwing, Helen Fraser, Okim Kang, Ron Thomson
L2 Accent and Ethics: Issues That Merit Attention
Friday, March 18, 2011
2 pm–3 pm
Most EAL teachers are aware that students may experience L2 accent discrimination, but they may not know the extensive range of factors contributing to negative consequences; neither may they recognize how accent can disadvantage a speaker beyond day-to-day interactions. In this colloquium, the presenters explore issues in which accent and ethics cross.
Tracey Derwing teaches in the TESL program and codirects the Prairie Metropolis Centre for Research on Immigration, Integration and Diversity, which spans six Canadian universities. The Centre brings together academics, policy makers, and nongovernment organizations involved in immigration issues. She and her colleague, Murray Munro, have conducted numerous studies related to L2 pronunciation and fluency, as well as studies of monolingual English listeners’ ability to understand foreign-accented speech.
Helen Fraser studied linguistics and phonetics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, then taught at several universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland before taking a position at the University of New England (UNE), Australia, which she held from 1990 to 2008. Her research focuses on cognitive aspects of phonetics, and covers both theoretical and applied topics, especially second language pronunciation and forensic phonetics. She is now an independent researcher, currently working part time at UNE’s Teaching and Learning Centre on a project titled “Speaking and Listening in the Multicultural University.”
Okim Kang is an assistant professor of applied linguistics at Northern Arizona University. Her research focuses on L2 pronunciation, language attitudes, and oral proficiency assessment. She is the winner of Christopher Brumfit PhD Thesis 2009 Award, and has received various research grants. Her publications appear in journals such as Modern Language Journal, System, and Journal of Language and Social Psychology.
Ron Thomson teaches courses in applied linguistics and TESL at Brock University. His research interests include the acquisition of L2 fluency and pronunciation, and professionalism in TESL. He is currently developing a computer-mediated approach to training second language speech perception and production, incorporating findings from current research into the program’s design.
Walt Wolfram
Exposing Sociolinguistic Variation: The TESOL Challenge
Saturday, March 19, 2011
8:30 am–9:30 am
Exposure to sociolinguistic variation poses a challenge for idealized versions of standard English assumed in traditional TESOL programs. This presentation offers a model for integrating language variation into the curriculum based on a decade of creative sociolinguistic engagement endeavors that include TV documentaries, curricular programs, and other public dissemination venues.
Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University where he directs the North Carolina Language and Life Project. He has pioneered research on social and ethnic dialects since the 1960s, and published 20 books and more than 300 articles. Professor Wolfram is concerned with the application of sociolinguistic information to social and educational problems, leading to the production of television documentaries, museum exhibits, and the first middle school dialect awareness curricula for a state education system. He has been president of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Dialect Society, and received numerous university awards, including the North Carolina Humanities Laureate and the Linguistic Society of America’s Linguistics and the Public Award.
Shondel Nero
Classroom Encounters With Caribbean Creole English: Language, Identities, and Pedagogy
Saturday, March 19, 2011
2 pm–3 pm
This presentation examines the language, identities, and pedagogical implications arising from an increasing number of Caribbean Creole English (CCE) speakers in North American schools. The presenter discusses teachers’ and students’ responses to encounters with CCE, and suggests using CCE to facilitate Caribbean students’ literacy development and raise language diversity awareness.
Shondel Nero is associate professor of TESOL at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University. Her research examines the politics, challenges, and strategies of educating students who speak or write in nonstandard varieties of English, World Englishes, and Creoles. She has researched the linguistic and educational needs of speakers of Caribbean Creole English in New York City schools. Her work has appeared in TESOL Quarterly and numerous scholarly journals. She is the author of Englishes in Contact: Anglophone Caribbean Students in an Urban College (Hampton, 2001), and editor of Dialects, Englishes, Creoles, and Education (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006).
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