From left, Dr. Lara Wallace (ELIP faculty), Tanya Bychkovska (M.A. alumna), Dr. Edna Lima (ELIP faculty), Zoe Zawadzki (M.A. student), and Anastasiia Kryzhanivska (M.A. alumna)
Linguistics faculty and a graduate student presented at the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages International Convention and English Expo in March.
The Ohio University Linguistics group also met up with alumni as teachers and scholars from around the world converged in Atlanta for the TESOL expo.
Two Linguistics faculty members, Dr. Lara Wallace and Dr. Edna Lima, were invited to speak on an intersection panel with two other professionals in the field. This panel was organized to bring together three key areas in the TESOL organization: the International Teaching Assistants interest section, the Speech Pronunciation Listening strand, and the Higher Education strand. The overall topic was “Instructional Technology Tools for Developing ITAs’ Oral Skills.”
Lima opened the panel with her presentation on “Technology for Teaching Pronunciation,” in which she set the stage for the other presenters by providing an overview of how technology can be applied to help ITAs improve their speech intelligibility. Lima is a lecturer in the English Language Improvement Program.
Wallace and Lima with their co-presenters and panel organizer.
Wallace followed with her presentation on “Personalized Pronunciation Practice for ITAs: Three Stress-Relieving Apps for Effectively Communicating in a Stress-Timed Language” wherein she shared three apps that address these pronunciation challenges: YouGlish (a trove of authentic speech samples and models for suprasegmental and segmental training), Blue Canoe (for peak vowel training as part of word stress), and Audacity (for visual understanding and analysis of one’s word stress and phrasal stress production, particularly for vowel length). This panel was very well attended, and both Wallace and Lima received numerous letters of appreciation and requests for follow ups. Wallace is a senior lecturer in the English Language Improvement Program.
From left, Gabriela Castaneda-Gleason, Center Joel Keefer, and Laura Thomas at TESOL
Gabriela Castaneda-Gleason, Lecturer in Linguistics, presented on Implementing a Remote Site Practicum Placement for Preservice Teachers. Castaneda’s presentation was on a program that she piloted with Joel Keefer, a former student, and Laura Thomas ’82, ’85M, who is currently a lecturer at Ohio State University and an OHIO alum. Thomas earned three degrees from the College of Arts & Sciences: bachelors in art and German and an M.A. in Linguistics.
“This is an example how Bobcats get together for productive collaborations no matter where they are” said Castaneda-Gleason. In this case, Keefer was a practicum student at OHIO and did his internship at OSU where Thomas welcomed him in one of her classes and mentored him while working remotely in collaboration with Castaneda-Gleason. This type of collaboration helped with the implementation of an online class that is now offered as part of the TEFL Certificate.
Finally, second-year Linguistics graduate student Zoe Zawadzki presented a poster in the Master’s Forum. Zawadzki’s poster focused on using talk shows to teach wh-questions through listening. The poster outlined a lesson which uses an interview with the cast of the Big Bang Theory on The Ellen Show. Zawadzki had many M.A. and Ph.D. students approach her about her work and express how appealing and innovative the idea was.
“It was a rewarding experience getting to go to TESOL, both sharing my work and seeing the work of other MA and PhD students,” said Zawadzki, who hopes to go to TESOL again in the future and share more of her work when she is a Ph.D. student at Iowa State University, where she stars in Fall 2019.
Happily, the group ran into and met up with many Linguistics alumni. Wallace remarked that she was delighted to see these alumni continuing in the field and was excited “to share professional tips with her [now] colleagues at other institutions.”
Zawadzki added, “It was fun getting to meet some of the past M.A. students from OHIO and seeing where they are now.”
Alumni Tanya Bychkovska and Anastasiia Kryzhanivska were supervised by Lima when they were Assistant Coordinators of the ELIP Undergraduate Writing Lab. Lima mentions that she “was excited to see her colleagues again and that she was proud of how much they have accomplished thus far.”
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