Presentation of Lynne Young Award 2022
Presented at the 2022 Graduate Symposium
By Dr Trudy O’Brien (retired)
“Thank you for allowing me the privilege and pleasure of again awarding the Dr. Lynne Young Award to a graduate student in SLALS. I would like to welcome from Scotland Lynne’s daughter Laura to the Symposium today.
I initiated the award after Lynne’s death in 2018 but the credit for the ongoing financial support for this award rests in family, friends, colleagues and former grad students. Today I am only the face of that supportive network and I appreciate that honour. I was Lynne Young’s friend and colleague for more than 40 years and for you to understand her remarkable character, academic accomplishments and personal legacy I would like to begin with a brief summary of her academic career.
Professor Lynne Young joined Carleton’s Linguistics department in 1976 as an instructor and coordinator for the first English-as-a-Second-Language Program for a group of students from Venezuela. This program eventually evolved into a non-credit intensive and then credit program covering all levels of ESL and EAP (English for Academic Purposes) in the Centre for Applied Linguistics. Lynne was an integral part of the evolution of that program. Over time she was also instrumental in the creation of an Applied Linguistics program in the expanding School of Linguistics and Language Studies (SLALS) at the undergraduate and especially in the graduate level.
Lynne Young completed her PhD Summa Cum Laude at Leuven University in Belgium in the area of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and a book based on her dissertation Language as Behavior, Language as Code: A study of academic English was published in 1990. Lynne continued to work in SLaLS as an Assistant and then Associate Professor and, over the next 25 years, established herself as one of North America’s main authorities in both SFL and Critical Discourse Analysis, specifically in the area of multimodalities of verbal and non-verbal communication. She has an impressive list of peer-reviewed articles, chapters and textbooks in her fields of interest along with many awards, grants, presentations, training sessions, and workshops. Her graduate teaching and mentoring were especially valued as shown by the award she received from Graduate students in 2001.
Lynne Young served as Assistant Director for the Degree Division of the School from 1996 to 2002 and Acting Director of the School for 2010/11 and remained active in all aspects of program development. Lynne retired in 2013 but remained active in both community volunteerism through the Stephen Lewis Foundation and in a life-long pursuit of knowledge and learning. Her amazing accomplishments both academically and personally were celebrated in the memorial held in her honor after her death in November 2018. An ALDS Graduate Award in her name is a fitting tribute to her contributions to the ALDS program, to SLALS and to her community.
Lynne Young was a warm and stalwart friend and mentor to me and to so many colleagues and to especially her students. Her graduate students all loved her and benefitted greatly from her meticulous attention to their work and her unfailing confidence in their ability to succeed.
I believe Lynne would have equally been pleased and supportive of the latest recipient of the award set up in her honor. The recipient of the 2022 award is Angela Garcia.
Angela is an international PhD candidate from Brazil who, like Lynne, entered her graduate program as a mature student. Angela, like Lynne has had a varied working life, centered on English language teaching. As well as being a free-lance interpreter, work she continues to do, Angela has a degree in Education, like Lynne, focusing on English as a Foreign Language and, like Lynne, has included technical writing and discourse in her studies. Angela had been a social analyst but since 2008 has focused primarily on test development and being a rater trainer for civil aviation in Brazil. This was supported by an MA at Lancaster Univ. in the UK in evaluation and testing, completing her thesis with Distinction. Her current PhD studies continues that work on developing enhanced English language testing for pilots, not just in Brazil but worldwide. As part of her doctoral program, Angela has been a TA for ESLA and CCPD, as well as working in Carleton’s student academic support program.
Currently Angela is writing a book chapter on the assessment of listening and continues to be an active member of the ICAEA research group and the International Language Testing Association.
Like Lynne Young, who worked for the Stephen Lewis Foundation, Angela also volunteers (e.g., Shepherds of Good Hope) and is an active member of her faith community.
It is with great pleasure that I award the 2022 Lynne Young Award to Angela Garcia.
Congratulations and all the best in the final stages of your doctoral studies.”