Research Groups: Friday, April 16

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Michael Friesner (faculty, Department of French) and Laura Kastronic (faculty, Department of French): "Developing sociolinguistic competence in French through the flipped classroom model."

​The flipped classroom approach (cf. Bergmann and Sams 2012), in which class time is largely devoted to collaborative activities, has recently been extended to the second-language classroom. Nonetheless, despite incorporating communicative methods, predominant pedagogical practices, focusing on prescriptive norms and traditional textbook explanations of linguistic phenomena (Mougeon et al. 2010), impart minimal sociolinguistic competence, leaving most second language learners ill-equipped to replicate native-like patterns of variation (cf. Dewaele 2004). Learners therefore overuse hyperstandard, hyperformal, or register-inappropriate forms. We believe that the flipped classroom model is well suited to addressing these challenges for FSL teaching. We therefore draw on variationist sociolinguistic research to foster a deeper understanding of three well-studied phenomena (cf. Mougeon et al. 2010) - negation, expression of future time, and first-person plural address - for which traditional pedagogical explanations diverge considerably from L1 community behaviour. We argue that time outside of the classroom is well spent building sociolinguistic awareness through evidence-driven description, corpus-based realia, and analytical commentary on sociolinguistic implications of variant choice, providing scaffolding for communicative in-class comprehension and production exercises. Additionally, we address questions of the appropriate point of intervention based on perceptions of casual or nonstandard linguistic behaviour by L1 speakers of varying geographic origins. 

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Fieldwork Group
Shabri Kapoor (Ph.D.): "The mass/count distinction in Cusco Quechua."

The mass/count distinction is often described as the difference between nouns that represent countable entities (dog/dogs), and uncountable entities such as substances or 'stuff' (water/*waters). Languages that have this distinction often show differences in the features that distinguish count from mass nouns. One such feature is the use of a container classifier when combining numerals with mass nouns (three cups of water). My research explores how the mass/count distinction applies to the Cusco variety of Quechua, and specifically, how container classifiers that combine numerals with mass nouns in Cusco Quechua differ morphologically, depending on classifier type.