Randall Gess
Professor
| Degrees: | B.A. (University of Texas), M.A. (University of Texas), Ph.D. (University of Washington) |
| Phone: | 613-520-2600 x 2332 |
| Email: | randall.gess@carleton.ca |
| Office: | 1621 Dunton Tower |
Office Hours: Monday 11:45am-1:15pm, Friday 9am-10:30am
Biography
I am an English-French bilingual from Texas – go figure! Achieving bilingualism has been a lifetime endeavour for me. I love French and I love her sister languages: Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc., as well as French-lexified creoles. I have a long (30-year) history of working on historical French phonology and for the past several years have also been working on phonological variation in current varieties, focusing especially on those in Canada. I am also passionate about the teaching and learning of French and French linguistics.
Research Interests
- Phonological variation in French
- Historical phonology of French
- French corpus linguistics and its applications to teaching
- Second language acquisition of French
- Teaching French pronunciation
- Haitian Creole
Currently I have several specific projects going on:
- Documenting the French spoken in Maillardville (Coquitlam), British Columbia.
- Exploring uses of spoken language corpora in the teaching of French oral skills
2024-2025 Courses
- FREN 2401A
- FREN 2701A (Winter)
- FREN 3411A (Fall)
Publications and presentations since 2013
Book
Bullock, Barbara and Randall Gess (under contract). Linguistics through French. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Edited books
Gabriel, Christoph, Randall Gess and Trudel Meisenburg. 2022. Manual of Romance Phonetics and Phonology. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter.
Journal articles
Herschensohn, Julia and Randall Gess. 2019. Transfer cost and the developmental path to target object clitic prosody. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9(6): 849-853. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.19055.her.
Herschensohn, Julia and Randall Gess. 2018. Acquisition of L2 French pronouns by advanced Anglophone learners. Languages, 3(2), 15; doi: 10.3390/languages3020015.
Gess, Randall. 2017. Using Corpus Data in the Development of Second Language Oral Communicative Competence. Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching 8: 13-31.
Book chapters
Bullock, Barbara E. and Randall Gess. 2023 (to appear). French in North America. Handbook of French. Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Mairi McLaughlin (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gess, Randall. 2022. A speech corpus approach to teaching French practical phonetics online. Online language teaching in diverse contexts. Angela George and Rachel Friedman (eds.), 61-74. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Meisenburg, Trudel, Christoph Gabriel and Randall Gess. 2022. Introduction. Manual of Romance Phonetics and Phonology. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter.
Gess, Randall, Haike Jacobs and Bernard Laks. 2020. Chapter 24. Évolution depuis l’ancien français. Grande Grammaire Historique du Français. Christiane Marchello-Nizia, Bernard Combettes, Sophie Prévost et Tobias Scheer (eds.). Berlin & New York: De Gruyter. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110348194-027
Gess, Randall. 2019. On the reduction of /ʒ/ in a minority North American variety of French. Contributions of Romance Languages to Current Linguistic Theory. Deborah Arteaga (ed.), 115-136. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 95. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Gess, Randall. 2013. Compensatory lengthening in Old French: The Role of the Speaker. Research on Old French: The State of the Art, Deborah Arteaga (ed.), 87-105. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 88. Dordrecht: Springer.
Presentations
Gess, Randall. 2023c. Paper presented at the Colloque de l’Association des professeur.e.s de français des universités et collèges canadiens, York University, May 27-30. “Le traitement de l’input dans la didactique de la prononciation avancée”
Gess, Randall. 2023b. Paper presented at the 7th Colloque international sur l’enseignement du français langue étrangère, University of Puerto Rico, February 23-25. “L’enseignement de la phonologie réceptive avancée”
Gess, Randall. 2023a. Paper presented remotely at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, San Francisco, January 5-8. Session on New Approaches to Romance Linguistics. “Variation among French heritage bilinguals in a French minority language context: A case study of four sisters in British Columbia’s Metro Vancouver Regional District”
Gess, Randall. 2021c. Paper presented remotely at the 15th International Conference on Foreign Languages, Communication and Culture (WEFLA 2021), University of Holguín, Cuba, April 28-30. “Spoken language corpora and the mirroring technique in foreign language teaching”
Gess, Randall. 2021b. Paper presented remotely at the Conference on Teaching Languages Online, University of Calgary, March 5-6. Panel on Creative Approaches to Online Language Learning. “Online teaching of practical phonetics: How (and why) to use the mirroring technique remotely”
Gess, Randall. 2021a. Paper presented remotely at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, Toronto, January 7-10. Session on New Approaches to Romance Linguistics. “Spoken language corpora and the L2 acquisition of Romance Languages”
Gess, Randall. 2019d. Paper presented at the Colloque de l’Association des professeur.e.s de français des universités et collèges canadiens, University of British Columbia, June 1-4. “Corpus oral et reflet sonore dans la pratique de l’oral”
Gess, Randall. 2019c. Paper presented at the 13th International Conference on Foreign Languages, Communication and Culture (WEFLA 2019), University of Holguín, Cuba, April 24-26. “Responsabilisation des étudiants au niveau du cursus du français”
Gess, Randall. 2019b. Poster presented at the 37th Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada, Universidad de Vallodolid, March 27-29. “Addressing curricular needs of post-immersion students of French: The potential of a spoken language corpus in a university program in Ontario, Canada”
Gess, Randall. 2019a. Paper presented at the 5th Colloque international sur l’enseignement du français langue étrangère, University of Puerto Rico, February 28-March 2. “Le corpus PFC dans l’enseignement du français : perspective plurielle intégrée”
Herschensohn, Julia, and Randall Gess. 2017. Paper presented at Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 13, Universitat de les Illes Balears, September 7-9. “Acquisition of L2 French object pronouns by advanced Anglophone learners”
Gess, Randall. 2017. Paper presented at the 47th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, University of Delaware, April 20-23. “On the debbucalization of /ʒ/ in a minority North American variety of French”
Gess, Randall. 2017. Paper presented at the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto Phonology Workshop, March 24-26. “Debuccalization of /ʒ/ in French: A phonetic case study from a B.C. speaker”
Gess, Randall. 2016. Paper presented at the conference, Français Langue Orale et Linguistique – Phonologie du français contemporain: schwa, phonologie de corpus, Paris, November 17-19. “La désarticulation de /ʒ/ chez un locuteur de Colombie-Britannique”
Boutin, Béatrice Akissi, and Randall Gess. 2016. Paper presented at the conference, Français Langue Orale et Linguistique – Phonologie du français contemporain: schwa, phonologie de corpus, Paris, November 17-19. “Y-a-t-il un schwa spécifique au français du Sénégal?”
Herschensohn, Julia, and Randall Gess. 2016. Paper presented at EuroSLA 26, Jyväskylä, Finland, August 24-27. “Prosodic Transfer in the L2 acquisition of French pronouns”
Gess, Randall. 2015. Paper presented at the conference, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching, Dallas, October 16-17. “Exploiting corpus data in the teaching of L2 pronunciation: The case of the Phonology of Contemporary French (PFC) project”
Gess, Randall. 2014. Paper presented at the conference, Français Langue Orale et Linguistique, Workshop on Phonologie et phonétique: Processus (phonologiques), Paris, December 4-9. “La contrôle du locuteur dans les processus phonologiques”