In the dwindling months of my tenure as Director of the School of Linguistics and Language Studies, I find myself not only planning out my coming administrative leave, but also reflecting on my eight years in this role, which has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. For someone like me with a deep interest in language, working in SLaLS is a constant pleasure. Sure, the many administrative challenges in overseeing a unit as large and complex as SLaLS can be overwhelming at times, but being constantly surrounded by interesting work on language is a fulsome reward.
Because we do so many things, we’re quite well known at Carleton — but in a rather strange way. Often, people may know us for the work we do that is most relevant to them (or their immediate concerns) while being completely unaware of our many other endeavours. There is no getting around that fact that many people think we do no more than offer the “service” program(s) that they are familiar with. This may be one of the many Modern Languages that we offer — up to a Minor in seven of them — in which students can become Independent or Proficient Users of the language, according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Or it might be the credit-bearing Academic English as a Second Language program that each year prepares our many new international students for studies in their second language and in a different academic culture. Or familiarity may be with the Communication Courses for Disciplines and Professions that help all Engineering and Information Technology students develop written and oral communication skills consistent with the generic standards of their chosen community of practice. Far fewer know that we offer all of these service programs, which together demonstrate that language learning is often a lifetime endeavour, even in one’s own first language.
For those familiar with one of our degree program areas, Linguistics or Applied Linguistics & Discourse Studies, the same partial knowledge often holds. For example, while our undergraduate program in Linguistics is known to our colleagues in the Institute of Cognitive Science, and to most in the departments of our sister disciplines in Cognitive Science (Psychology, Philosophy and Computer Science), they may not know about our work in Writing Studies or Critical Discourse Analysis, which our colleagues in English are much more likely to know about.
Part of this is simply because it is very rare to have so much diversity in a single unit — much of what we do is housed in multiple places on other campuses. And the range of what we do really is massive. In my own field of expertise, phonology, we are concerned with things like what enables us, when we have something to say, to properly assemble words and associated sound strings into well-formed syllables, rhythmic units, and phrases, and deliver them to our interlocutors and, on the receptive side of things, to parse an incoming speech signal into discrete sounds and map them on to words and pieces of grammar so as to understand our interlocutors’ message. This is pretty far removed from a lot of the work going on in the School, where another colleague explores written or multimodal genres of things ranging from suicide notes to the teaching of mathematics.
The jewel in our crown is our graduate program in Applied Linguistics & Discourse Studies. We have a PhD program just wrapping up its third year, and a long-standing MA program (the first thesis appearing in 1992). Our program produces work that really matters. Much of it matters here at Carleton and/or in the higher education context generally, focusing on issues in teaching, learning, and assessment. Since language use is crucial in knowledge making and knowledge transfer, this work touches not only on the expected teaching, learning, and assessment in English as a Second Language, and foreign language programs, but on teaching, learning, and assessment in a range of disciplines including economics, engineering, mathematics, medical physics, history and biology. Some of this work has changed the face of Carleton University. The most obvious examples are the Writing Tutorial Service, the Communication Courses for Disciplines and Professions, and the Academic English as a Second Language program, but scholarship from our School has also contributed to the Educational Development Centre, the Centre for Initiatives in Education, the First-Year Seminar program, as well as to the Faculty of Engineering and Design in the form of post-entry diagnostic testing of first-year students to identify those “at-risk”.
Our international graduate students often produce work that will have an impact on teaching, learning, and assessment in their home countries. They have studied things like the impact of study abroad scholarship programs in Libya, negative consequences of the School Leaving Certificate Examination in Nepal, and a variety of issues related to English language teaching and/or assessment in the educational systems of countries like Japan, Korea, Mexico, Nepal and Tunisia.
Back to relevance here in Canada, but outside of higher education, our students have produced work related to literacy programs, immersion and Core French programs, language testing in the public service, on-the-job development of workplace writing ability, and language use by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Other important work from the Critical Discourse Analysis side of our School has explored things like the discourse around climate change, generic features of suicide notes, biculturalism in Canadian immigrant populations, the discursive construction of belonging in Quebec, and racialized discourse around national security. I’m very proud that since 2010 there have been four theses on Indigenous language issues, and we are hoping to further our strength in this area with a new hire that will be finalized in the coming weeks. This is just a taste of the type of scholarship coming out of our graduate program, which has produced over 100 theses and many more research essays.
For a sampling of this year’s work, please come to our 11th Annual Graduate Student Symposium: Language, Learning, and Society. The symposium will take place from 3:00-5:00 on Friday, March 4th, in 303 St. Patrick’s Building.
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