February 17, 2013 A politician may spend twenty or more years running for office, and just as many years on the campaign trail trying to keep or win over voters. The public language of political candidates has always been complicated by questions of attempted audience accommodation, performance and authenticity, topics which were rarely if ever..

This presentation is devoted to sociolinguistic analyses of African American vernacular English (AAVE), including studies of morphophonemic variation and analyses of copula variability among black speakers across the United States. Tense and Aspect in AAVE will also be discussed, especially regarding the usage of “steady” as in “They be steady runnin’.”  A combination of synchronic..

PowerPoint presentation: Multilingual turn in sociolinguistics: What use is it to educators? Dr. Fiona Willans’s research focuses on language policy and multilingual education, with a particular interest in the context of Vanuatu. She combines ethnography and discourse analysis to examine the way language is used and talked about within the domain of education, focusing on..

PowerPoint presentation: Multilingual education policy in the Pacific: Insights from Vanuatu. Dr. Fiona Willans’s research focuses on language policy and multilingual education, with a particular interest in the context of Vanuatu. She combines ethnography and discourse analysis to examine the way language is used and talked about within the domain of education, focusing on the..

March 20, 2015 Abstract: In this talk I demonstrate how a combined research and community partnership program in California addresses educational and linguistic problems by promoting sociolinguistic justice (Bucholtz et al. forthcoming). SKILLS (School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society) prepares low-income Latina/o high school students for college by guiding them to undertake original..

Thursday, February 5, 2015 Despite being a crucial social marker of many of these groups, dialect and language variation has remained outside of the diversity canon. Even as sociolinguistic information has begun to permeate teacher education programs, linguistically aware teachers are often stifled by a paucity of materials that teach about language variation. In this..