You can read it here.

Congratulations, Diane!

From the publisher:

Incidents in an Educational Life explores the lessons Swales learned by teaching and by being taught. The story follows his gradual transformation from an English as a Second Language teacher to one of the leading international figures in his field, stopping along the way to tell the sometimes amusing, sometimes painful anecdotes that have made him the recognized educator he is today. His entertaining prose make this volume a must-read for anyone considering the field, or the many ways in which we all become teachers.

John also published “Telling a research story: Writing a literature review” with Chris Feak, also with  University of Michigan press.

from the publisher:

Telling a Research Story: Writing a Literature Review is concerned with the writing of a literature review…This volume progresses from general to specific issues in the writing of literature reviews. It opens with some orientations that raise awareness of the issues that surround the telling of a research story. Issues of structure and matters of language, style, and rhetoric are then discussed. Sections on metadiscourse, citation, and paraphrasing and summarizing are included.

From the National Science Foundation

High school students from across the U.S. won individual and team honors last week at the seventh annual International Olympiad in Linguistics held in Wroclaw, Poland. The results reflect U.S. competence in computational linguistics, an emerging field that has applications in computer science, language processing, code breaking and other advanced arenas.

The U.S. fielded two teams at the Olympiad, which featured competitors from 17 different countries, including Australia, Germany, India, South Korea and Russia. Rebecca Jacobs of Los Angeles took the highest individual honor of any U.S. competitor with a silver medal, while John Berman of Wilmington, N.C., Sergei Bernstein of Boston, and Alan Huang of Beverly Hills, Mich., each took home bronze medals. Morris Alper of Palo Alto, Calif., Daryl Hansen of Sammamish, Wash., Anand Natarajan of San Jose, Calif. and Vivaek Shivakumar of Arlington, Va. received honorable mentions for their work. Berman and Huang were also recognized for their solutions to specific problems.

The U.S. Red team, comprised of Alper, Huang, Jacobs, and Natarajan took home the gold cup in team competition.

This year’s U.S. teams were chosen from hundreds of students who competed in the third annual North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) that took place this past winter throughout the country. NACLO, and the U.S. teams that competed this summer, are sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Google, Cambridge University Press, Microsoft, Everyzing, M*Modal, JUST. Systems, The North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Oxford University Press, Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, the University of Michigan, Brandeis University, and the University of Pittsburgh Linguistics Department.

Read the rest of the story

I attended the first three week session of the LSA Institute in Berkeley California with the intention of taking a number of courses on language acquisition and psycholinguistics. (I had initially registered for Prosody and Language Comprehension, Auditory Word Recognition, Infant Language Acquisition and Cross Linguistic Language Acquisition.) However, there were so many other interesting topics and lecturers, that I found myself sitting in on a lot of other courses just for my own edification. This wide exposure to a lot of varied subject matter was very stimulating and inspiring.

Living in the dorms allowed me to meet quite a few other students of Linguistics from all over the world, and we had quite a bit of fun during off-hours hiking in the Berkeley Hills, and seeing the local sites.

I wouldn’t hesitate the recommend participation in future LSA Institutes to anyone who is interested!

From the series:  Linguists in the Woods

Tridha Chatterjee is interested in language contact in India

Yan Dong is interested in syllable structure and other aspects of phonological theory

Harim Kwon is interested in the phonetic-phonology interface

Candice Scott is interested in language contact, sociolinguistics and historical linguistics

Yiwen Zhou is interested in sociolinguistics and minority languages in China

Ezra Keshet joins the faculty in the area of semantics.  Professor Keshet completed his PhD in semantics at MIT and was the Language Learning Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department last year. Ezra’s work focuses on syntax, pragmatics and discours

Anne Curzan joins the faculty by courtesy in the area of English linguistics, History of English, language and gender and linguistic pedagogy.  Professor Curzan holds her primary appointment as Associate Professor and Thurnau Professor in the Department of English

Nick  Ellis joins the faculty by courtesy in the area of second language acquisition, language learning, construction grammar and cognitive linguistics.  Professor Ellis holds his primary appointment as Professor in the Department of Psychology and the English Language Institute

Barbara Meek joins the faculty by courtesy in the area of linguistic anthropology, child language socialization and acquisition, endangered and/or dormant language issues, linguistic theory and Athabaskan linguistics.  Professor Meek holds her primary appointment as Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology.

The Linguistics Department wishes everyone a good start to the new academic year.

You can find us physically on the fourth floor of Lorch Hall.  You can keep up with us virtually by becoming a fan of the department on Facebook.  Just search for “University of Michigan Linguistics.”