Undergrad Graduation Lunch!! 🎓🍽️🎉

Graduating from university is a significant accomplishment that deserves celebration, and what better way to do so than with a graduation lunch? Recently, the Department of Linguistics hosted a luncheon to honour the hard work and achievements of their undergrads who will be graduating this term! 

In the comfort of the Linguistics Lounge, students and faculty members reflected on their time in the department and chatted about up-and-coming plans! Between the amazing company and the delicious food, the event was a hit!! 

Huge thank you to the staff and faculty members who took the time to organize and attend the lunch! We are very proud of our graduating students and are excited to see what lies ahead for them! 

Can you guess some of the next steps our undergrads will be taking??  

Is Nathan Sanders actually using games to teach linguistics?

Who here took LIN228/229 with Nathan Sanders (Faculty) and LOVED the games he created to help students learn? Who here has no clue what we are talking about but wants to hear more? 

If you said yes, you're in luck as Sanders will be giving an online talk to the Linguistics and Language Development Student Association at San José State University on this very topic! This will be taking place March 20th at 6:00pm EST. Please register to get the Zoom link.

Read over his abstract to understand why this will be such an exciting talk! 🤩

"Using Learning Games for Phonetics and Phonology"

Research shows that students perform better in courses when they take part in active learning, which involves activities or discussions in class that engage them in the process of learning, rather than traditional lectures that require them to passively listen (Hake 1998, Freeman et al. 2014, Michael 2006). However, many instructors may still be reluctant to introduce active learning into their courses for various reasons (Henderson and Dancy 2007, Deslauriers et al. 2019). Educational games have long been known to be useful ways to reap the benefits of active learning, by increasing student engagement, participation, and ultimately, performance (Cruickshank and Telfer 1980, Lepper and Cordova 1992, Sugar and Takacs 1999, Massey et al. 2005, Ritzo and Robinson 2006). Furthermore, games can be easy to implement in the classroom, sometimes requiring little more than pencil and paper or minimal adaptation of existing games, alleviating some of the difficulties instructors have with introducing active learning. Phonetics and phonology are particularly well-suited for adaptation to games, especially matching games, because they involve multidimensional structures allowing for many different ways of dividing up important concepts into meaningful groups of matching elements (the IPA, phonological features, etc.). In this talk, I present a few examples of educational games I have used in my courses for phonetics and phonology content, with discussion of the design principles that underlie the games to help other instructors understand how best to design and adapt their own games.

This talk is based on some of his work done with Danielle Daidone (University of North Carolina Wilmington).  Be sure to check out the full paper as well!

TULCON16!!!

In case you have not heard, SLUGS is hosting TULCON16 this upcoming weekend!! With an incredible line up of keynote speakers, including Noam Chomsky himself), this will be a jam packed weekend of wonderful linguistic work! 

Presentations cover a range of topics from speech disorders to the use of A.I. to theoretical syntax and everything in between! Below you can see the list of all UofT speakers presenting at the conference.Visit the TULCON16 website to get the extensive schedule with abstracts. 

UofT Presentations: 

- Dr. Regina Jokel (Faculty)  "Language as a diagnostic tool"

- Ewan Dunbar (Department of French)  "Are the Robots as smart as babies now?

- Siyi Fan (Undergrad)  & Shiyang Sun (Undergrad) "A variationist study of first-person-singular subject ellipsis in epistemic verb phrases of Heritage Cantonese" 

- Tony (Juntao) Hu (Undergrad) "Secondary thematic role encoding in require vs. allow verbs"

- Patrick Kinshular (Undergrad) "Semantic constraints in Kirundi phonology"

- Mechelle Wu  (Undergrad) "The citizens of everywhere and nowhere: A pilot study examining the linguistic behaviours of Third-Culture Kids (TCKs)" 

- Naim Lim  (Undergrad) "Acoustic study of word-initial liquids in Korean loanwords for English produced by Korean speakers"

- Hafza Nuh  (Undergrad) "An analysis of English stop consonant perception and production in L1 Somali speakers and comparison with L1 English speakers: A study of /p/ and /b/

- Laura Escobar (Undergrad) "The intonation of statements in the casual spontaneous speech of Tokyo Japanese" 

If you are interesting in attending, please register in advance.  For those who would like to get involved with TULCON, SLUGS is accepting volunteers to help with organization matters throughout the day.

We are SO excited for TULCON and hope you all can make it!