Digital tools are increasingly important in academic networking. During this professional development seminar, we will discuss some useful tools for graduate students to help get the most out of their online academic networking experience. In this session, we will discuss Academia.edu, LinkedIn, Twitter, Interfolio, Mendeley, Zotero, and more. New graduate students, veteran students, and faculty are welcome to join the conversation to share their own experiences with their digital academic life, including their favorite resources for networking and examples of how digital tools have enhanced their academic life.

Since the implementation of the communicative approaches in the 1970s, pronunciation in second language instruction has been overlooked. Recent research has proven pronunciation instruction and corrective feedback to be beneficial for students’ second language pronunciation. The purpose of this study was to analyze which correction method, between self-correction and explicit correction, was more effective at improving students’ pronunciation of the Spanish sounds [x] 'j' and -ø- 'h' in word-initial position. A pre-test was conducted in two groups of 18 students taking Spanish II at a private Midwestern college. The participants received instruction and models of how to pronounce words with the studied sounds. For the next seven weeks, one of the two groups used the explicit correction method and the other one used self-correction. A week before the end of the semester the post-test was conducted. A two-way ANOVA analysis served to examine the effects of the two correction methods. The findings have pedagogical implications and will show that the self-correction method benefited students’ pronunciation more.

This article focuses on male perpetrators’ discourse of domestic violence in a “post-violent” interview. I analyze a high-profile domestic abuse case that happened between a Sino-American couple: Li Yang (a celebrity English teacher also the founder of Crazy English) and Kim Lee (a Caucasian American, Li Yang’s wife, former English teacher and colleague of Li Yang). I draw data from a televised interview that was aired on Chinese national television (i.e. CCTV) on September 25, 2011. I show, first of all, how Li Yang employs different discursive strategies in doing remedial work and therefore attaching meaning to the violent incident. I argue that Li Yang’s domestic abuse case has to be dealt with under a more deeply entrenched social structure of gender inequality and hegemonic masculinity—an ideology that still prevails in the contemporary Chinese society. Secondly, by attending to the linguistic details of both the interviewer Chai Jing and the interviewee Li Yang, I explore how they negotiate their stances interpersonally. Last but not least, methodologically, this article brings a conversation analytic perspective to bear on the study of domestic violence.

As a relatively new phenomenon in the phonology of Scottish English, TH-fronting has surprised sociolinguists by its rapid spread in the urban heartlands of Scotland. While attempts have been made to understand and model the influence of lexical effects, media effects and frequency effects, far less understood is the role of social identity. Using data collected as part of an ethnographic study of a high school in the south side of Glasgow, Scotland, this talk addresses this gap in the literature by considering how variants of (θ) are patterned across three adolescent male Communities of Practice. Drawing on recent work on linguistic variation and social meaning (Eckert 2000), the article explores some of the social meanings of (θ), particularly those variants which previous research has reported as being associated with ‘toughness’ in Scottish English.

After spending some time on definitions of implicit knowledge and related concepts, I will illustrate how failing to make the implicit/explicit distinction leads to fundamental misunderstandings in a variety of areas in applied linguistics. I will then discuss pros and cons of various methodologies for eliciting implicit knowledge, and end with some suggestions about how they could be used to research a variety of questions

This paper reports on a study of the zero phenomenon (the erroneous nonuse of surface articles) in English article acquisition by Chinese EFL learners. Four contributing factors to this phenomenon are identified, including English article semantics, typological differences between English and Chinese, L1 transfer and input features of the relevant structures. The four factors are likely to interact with each other to influence how Chinese learners process input and develop interlanguage knowledge of articles. Based on this analysis, three predictions were made and tested empirically. Data collected from three groups of Chinese learners provided converging evidence that these learners behaved as predicted.

Language and sexuality studies have changed greatly since the 1990s when discussions highlighted linguistic practices as markers of sexual identity and difference. Today’s interests in language and desire bring together interests in language and affect and language and political economy through carefully focused studies of ideology and stance taking. To develop this point, I turn to a current research project exploring audience reactions to the content and imagery displayed in commercially prepared gay pornography. In this presentation, I consider gay porn viewers’ use of the term “hot” in on-line postings to porn-related websites, chat rooms, and news blogs. “Hot” indexes valued masculine properties that viewers associate with certain gay porn performers and their on-screen performances—but not with all of them. “Twinks” (young, ephebic-like characters) are consistently found to be appealing and attractive, but they are “hot” only under very specific circumstances. Similarly, “hot” collocates irregularly with explicit references to race or ethnicity in these postings.

So I am interested in who is included – and excluded – under the stance-marker “hot”, and how depictions of performers (and the characters they play) are altered when viewers include (or exclude) “hot” in their commentary. I am also interested in who is speaking in these instances, and in recovering evidence from on-line sources that allows me to construct a profile of the social voice. But most importantly, I interested in clarifying the regulatory assumptions that define and shape inclusion and exclusion in these moments of linguistic usage. Through its evaluatory work, the viewers are producing cartography of experience whose details allow certain forms of marginality and deviance to become sites of value and praise, and comparable forms of marginality and deviance are pushed even deeper in the margins. Far from being an innocent erotic reference, “hot” is deeply embedded in homonormative practice, and the same is true for the audience reception/discussion of gay pornography that “hot” enables.

Retroflex stops, or stops (including both plosives and implosives) that are articulated with a curling of the tongue, are considered a typologically marked feature found only in an estimated 11 percent of the world’s languages. Rarer still are pre-nasalized retroflex stops and retroflex implosives. In this paper, data on a language with both of these types of retroflex sounds will be presented. The language of interest is an under-described and under-documented variety of Kizigua, a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania, in Somalia, and in refugee communities in various countries including the US. The dialect referred to in this paper as the Somali Bantu dialect, as spoken by the 4 subjects involved in this study, has three contrasting retroflex stops (one retroflex implosive, which exists in allophonic variation with an alveolar variant, and two pre-nasalized stops contrasting in voicing). The main research question addressed in this paper is whether it is more likely that these retroflex stops emerged due to internal motivation or due to contact. Given the fact that the socio-historical situation involves movement from a geographical region dominated by Bantu languages lacking retroflexion to a region dominated by Cushitic languages in which retroflexion is more common, one might immediately suspect that contact was a major contributing factor. While some contact features are clearly present such as in loanword vocabulary, there is also evidence suggesting the possibility of internal motivation. The overall picture that will be presented is that retroflexion in implosives and retroflexion in pre-nasalized stops may have been two independent developments with different motivations. Given the typological rarity of retroflexion especially in implosives and in pre-nasalized stops, an examination of the Kizigua data has broader implications for the development of models of sound change.

Using the most frequently submitted items in a corpus of undergraduate student slang dated fall 2005 through spring 2012, this study assesses how both maintenance and innovation function in the group-identifying vocabulary of recent American college students.

Investigating how contested periods are remembered by younger generations allows us to better understand the contents that are passed on as well as the discursive processes through which intergenerational transmission occurs. This paper explores the intersections of collective and personal memory from a critical discourse analysis perspective using data from an ethnographic project conducted in Uruguay during 2010-2011. I look at an interaction as an instance of situated language use that serves to show the circulation of discourses about the past as well as the (re)construction of representations and the enactment of different orientations towards those discourses.

The analysis of the group interview identifies the youth’s arguments, representations and evaluations of the dictatorship period, while exploring intertextual links that link them to public discourses. The findings show there are four main arguments used by the youth to explain the dictatorship: reaction to guerrillas, authoritarianism, regional ideological war, and intolerance. The social actors are evaluated in terms of social sanctions with negative evaluations of the guerrilla. Intertextual connections foreground the reception of hegemonic discourses that explain the period in terms of the “two demons” topoi. What youth know about the past is a situated and socially distributed web of meanings that help them make sense of the past and construct their socio-political identities.

Felicia Grasso (with Jody Garcia)
Jody's work centers on language contact and historical language change. My work with Jody’s research included translating a number of texts in different dialects of German to English. I took a look at translation theory, the issues that have arisen over the years in translation. I gave a sample of specific issues I ran into when translating dialects and outdated German texts into English, and show how I chose to face these issues. I show my work was heavily influenced by Nida's concept of equivalence through the translation of poetry. Nida argues that “one of the most essential, and yet often neglected, elements is the expressive factor, for people must also feel as well as understand what is said.” In my translation of works from Heine and others, I have experienced the same struggle in expressing emotion of the original author, felt when read in the source text.

Mara Katz
My research involves historical analysis of Somali Bantu Kizigua, an underdocumented language from the Bantu family spoken by members of the Somali refugee community in Pittsburgh. I am documenting the morphosyntactic structures of the language, with the goal of creating a teachable grammar, as well as performing comparative historical analysis to determine how much the language differs from related languages as well as earlier forms of itself.

Anisa Mughal (with Nausica Marcos)
Syntactic awareness (SA) is the knowledge of a word category without necessarily knowing what the word itself means (Kieffer & Lesaux, 2012). SA is an attribute of derivational morphology that reflects a second language learner’s knowledge of how affixes of words change the meaning of a word (Kieffer & Lesaux). Testing for SA was conducted with 225 English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish at different proficiency levels. These learners completed an SA task that tested knowledge of Spanish nouns, adjectives and verbs. Preliminary results support the hypothesis that SA increases with proficiency.

An Analysis of Minimum Pause Durations
Spencer Onuffer (with Mary Lou Vercellotti)
This study hopes to determine the most efficient and accurate measures of fluency and pause. It uses thirteen minimum pause lengths one data set to create a comparison of the same results using different measures. This data may be able to determine if there is a specific pause length at which a pause is no longer the same type of pause: for example if there is a notable difference between a short and long pause it will determine at what length a pause becomes long. The data will also be used to determine what measures are most affected by the different minimum pause lengths. The data will also be used to display the results in terms of trade-off effects using mean length of fluent run and mean length of utterance to display if the data can display a relation between complexity accuracy and fluency.

Not All Clauses are Created Equal: Classifying Complexity in ESL Speech
Jessica Packer (with Mary Lou Vercellotti)
“Complex language” has been defined as language which utilizes a diverse range of structures. This conceptualization presents complexity as one means of gauging language proficiency over time. In the past, SLA researchers have combined finite and non-finite clauses when reporting on structural complexity. Within such coding systems, finite clauses and non- finite clauses with a complement or adjunct were considered equal as “clauses,” where complexity could then be gauged in global terms (words per sentence), by subordination (clauses per sentence), and subphrasally (words per clause). This classification schema has presented with weaknesses in its ability to gauge proficiency level in language learns. Thus, it has been proposed that it is likely obscuring the multi-faceted nature of structural complexity. On this basis, this research proposes a new classification scheme which recognizes the following: independent clauses, conjunctive verb phrase clauses, subordinate clauses, complementizer clauses, and relative clauses. These new classifications are derived from theoretical literature on clause acquisition and also from English language instruction curriculum material. The classification scheme is applied to production data taken from L2 instructed English learners over real time and the frequencies of learners’ production of these clauses over time are considered in order to characterize the development of complexity.

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