News Archive

2015 GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM The second annual Graduate Student Research Symposium was held on April 21, 2015 and was a great success.	STUDENT RESEARCH COMPETITION Come support our LING students in the CSULB Research Competition on Friday, February 20! Morning talks are in CBA-123, afternoon talks in CBA-140A. Dylan Anderson: Discourse marker use in ESL speakers: the effect of American reality television on usage and acquisition (11:00) Nancy Ngo: Accessing the semantics of Japanese numeral classifiers (11:20) Vanessa Conte Herse: Perceptions of negative politeness and gender by second-language speakers (11:40) Luo Wang: Mandarin tone production and perception: a performance comparison between tonal (Punjabi) and non-tonal (Korean) speakers (12:30) Dani Garcia: Effects of bilingualism and age on visual working memory (1:10) Monica McGuthrie: An interventional study: adult ESL beginners and advanced learners on acquiring and producing pragmatic requests (1:50) Carla Gordon: Linguistic gender dimorphism and web register (2:10)
NEW PEACE CORPS PARTNERSHIP CSULB Linguistics is partnering with the Peace Corps to offer a Master’s International (MI) program in TESOL.MI students do their Peace Corps service in the middle of the M.A., and receive course credit for their service.For more details, please contact graduate advisor Dr. Rebekha Abbuhl: Rebekha.Abbuhl@csulb.edu. More information can also be found here. You can also view information on our program on the Peace Corps website.	CATESOL 2014 Two Linguistics M.A. students presented their research at the 2014 CATESOL Conference in Santa Clara. Miyoki Chan spoke on “Cell Phone Timer Application-Its Effect on Oral Fluency and Anxiety”. Vanessa Conte spoke on “Knowing through Seeing: Teaching Active Observation in the ESL Classroom”.
INTERNSHIP: NEW DIMENSIONS IN TESTIMONY In summer 2014, Linguistics major Carla Gordon did a summer REU internship at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.Carla worked with the Natural Language Dialogue Group to develop the language function of virtual humans.Click here to read more…	STUDENT RESEARCH IN CORPUS LINGUISTICS Four CSULB linguists presented at the 2014 American Association for Corpus Linguistics conference in Flagstaff, Arizona: Jed Pizarro-Guevara (MA ’14): The distributional information of relative clauses in child-directed Tagalog Vanessa Conte Herse (MA): Hedging in Court: A Corpus-based Study of Gender Effects on Testimony Language Carla Gordon (BA): Gender Dimorphism in Estoric Language Hiroshi Kurakata (BA ’14): A Corpus Study of the American Nations
PHD BOUND! Three CSULB Linguistics alumni are beginning PhD programs in Fall 2014:Jed Pizarro-Guevara (MA ’14) in Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz; Lisa Kemp (MA ’13) in Cognitive Psychology at Louisiana State University; and Ibrahim Alluhaybi (MA ’14) in Linguistics at University of Texas Arlington .	NEW MINOR: TEACHING ENGLISH TO SPEAKERS OF OTHER LANGUAGES As of Fall 2015, Linguistics will offer a new minor in TESOL. This minor is excellent preparation for students who would like to teach English abroad, or prepare for an M.A. degree or graduate certificate in TESOL.The minor consists of LING 170, 325, 329, 420, 460 and 486.Students can begin taking courses towards the minor now, although it’s not possible to officially declare the minor until Fall 2015.Contact Dr. Wendy Klein (Wendy.Klein@csulb.edu) for more details.
FEATURED ALUMNUS: VUTH RETH Vuth Reth (MA ’99) is Dean of the Faculty of English at Cambodia’s National University of Management. He works closely with Cambodia’s education minister, Hang Choun Naron, on educational reforms at the national level. He is also an advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense, regarding foreign affairs.Full profile – More alumni profiles	LINGUISTICS RECOGNIZED FOR “HIGH ACHIEVEMENT IN STUDENT SUCCESS FOR 2014” The Linguistics department was recognized as one of the CSULB departments with the highest graduation rates over the past 3 years.As a relatively small department, Linguistics is able to offer small classes, personalized advising and a high degree of student-faculty interaction.The $20,000 reward for this achievement will be used to further strengthen our student success initiatives.
CONTE HERSE WINS AT BERKELEY Linguistics student Vanessa Conte Herse won the Danesha McCoy award for her presentation at the Berkeley Sociological Research Symposium in April 2014. Her talk “Hedging in Court: A Corpus-based Study of Gender Effects on Testimony Language” was based on her final project in LING 501 Corpus Linguistics.	CAREER FOCUS: TESOL Lane Igoudin (MA ’06) is Associate Professor of English/ESL at Los Angeles City College. Dr. Igoudin recently spoke to CSULB linguists on career opportunities in TESOL.
PIZARRO-GUEVARA WINS STATE RESEARCH COMPETITION Jed Pizarro-Guevara (M.A. ’14) took first place in the Behavioral and Social Science division of the statewide CSU research competition, with his paper “A Psycholinguistic Study of Tagalog Relative Clauses: Age of Acquisition and Comprehension”.	COMMENCEMENT 2014 The department honored the dozens of new Linguistics graduates with a brunch before the Spring 2014 ceremony. Congratulations and best of luck to all. Keep in touch!
LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION IN STOCKHOLM Jed Pizarro-Guevara (M.A. ’14), Inessa Udovchenko, and Hiroshi Kurakata (B.A. ’14) attended the International Summer School in Language Documentation in Stockholm, Sweden.	LINGUIST WINS OUTSTANDING BACCALAUREATE Linguistics major Lauren Faust was selected as one of three outstanding baccalaureate students from the College of Liberal Arts.Lauren is a President’s Scholar and a member of the University Honors Program. Her honors thesis was a corpus linguistics study of stroke patients’ speech. In Fall 2014, Lauren intends to enter an M.A. program in Speech Pathology.
LINGUISTS AT THE SSRIC Six CSULB linguists presented their research in the 39th Annual CSU Social Science Research and Instructional Council Student Research Conference on May 8 at CSU Fullerton. Conte Herse, Vanessa. “Hedging in Court: A Corpus-based Study of Gender Effects in Testimony” Martinez, Jose Miguel. “French for Spanish Speakers: A Contrastive Study of Adult French Learners’ Compositions” Pizarro-Guevara, Jed Sam. “Age of Acquisition and Comprehension: A Psycholinguistic Study of Tagalog Relative Clauses” Ngo, Nancy. “A Pilot Study: Learners of Japanese and the Underlying Semantics of Numerical Classifers.” Garcia, Danielle. “A Pilot Study: L2 Acquisitions in an Adolescent Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder” Kurakata, Hiroshi. “The American States of Mind: A Corpus Study”
JED PIZARRO-GUEVARA WINS CSULB RESEARCH COMPETITION Linguistics M.A. student Jed Pizarro-Guevara took first place in the CSULB student research competition in the category of Social and Behavioral Sciences, with his presentation “The age of acquisition and relative clause comprehension in Tagalog as a first language”. He will represent CSULB at the statewide competition at Cal State East Bay, on May 2-3.Linguistics was well-represented in the competition, with outstanding presentations by Vanessa Conte-Herse, Hiroshi Kurakata, and Jose Martinez. A large Linguistics “posse” turned out to support them.
FACULTY RESEARCH: COMMUNICATION IN MARRIAGE Dr. Wendy Klein contributed a chapter on “Housework: Couples’ Collaboration and Conflict” (coauthored with Carolina Izquierdo) to Fast Forward Family: Home, Work, and Relationships in Middle Class America. Her work was also featured in the Atlantic. More on Dr. Klein’s research.	INTERNSHIP: TALKING TO VIRTUAL HUMANS Lauren Faust was one of 8 undergraduates chosen nationwide for an NSF-funded REU internship at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. Her research on how patients talk to a virtual therapist (left) was presented and published in Semdial 2013 (link to .pdf). More Linguistics internships.
STUDENT RESEARCH: ENDANGERED LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION Naiyapak Phakkahn spent winter break in a Thai village, making recordings of the Yoy language. This endangered language, spoken by 6000 people, has never been described. Naiyapak’s M.A. thesis will focus on the grammar and sound structure of Yoy, including its complex tonal system.	FEATURED ALUMNA: LEEANNE LANGTON LeeAnne (M.A. 1995) spent most of 2013 in Tanzania, as a Senior Language Fellow of the U.S. State Department. She trained teachers and designed curricula at St. Augustine University. A former Peace Corps volunteer, LeeAnne speaks seven languages. She teaches in CSULB’s English department, where she specializes in academic writing, ESL, heritage language preservation, and multi-lingualism. More on LeeAnne Langton. More alumni profiles
FEATURED ALUMNUS: DR. MARSHALL THOMAS As Director of Veterans Services at CSULB, Linguistics alumnus Dr. Marshall Thomas has been a pioneer in creating a welcoming environment for student vets. Click here to watch a recent talk.More alumni profiles.	FEATURED COURSE: AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE Through his highly popular American Sign Language courses, Bill Rennie brings the Deaf and hearing worlds together. Bill also teaches workshops through the Sign Language Factory. More Linguistics courses.