Faculty Research

Refugees’ Acclimatization and Learning: Educators’ Creative Solutions.

Hallett, Jill. (2023). (with Sussan Oladipo, Annmarie Handley, and Rachel Lackey). In Wolsey, T. D. & Karkouti, I. M. Teaching Refugees and Displaced Students: What Every Educator Should Know (pp.49-64). Springer Texts in Education Series.

This chapter focuses on the creativity employed by educators working with refugee students in the city of Chicago. Here, three educators and one parent/ community member reflect on solutions to challenges before, during, and after remote learning; some of these solutions are easily enacted while others take multifaceted approaches to long-term, complex issues.

Read the chapter here. 

“Good enough” processing under various language learning contexts 

Researcher: Dr. Gyu-Ho Shin 

Duration: 2023-2024

The project, funded by the Language Learning journal’s Early Career Research Grant, aims to investigates how the linguistic processor under various language-learning contexts operates in comprehension of clausal constructions.

 

Transfer and Crosslinguistic Influence at the L3 initial stages.

Researchers: Jennifer Cabrelli (Hispanic and Italian Studies) and Carrie Pichan (Linguistics)

While the question of which variables determine the source of transfer at the very initial stages of third language (L3) acquisition has driven the growth of the field, few studies have captured these early developmental processes in L3 acquisition. These studies observe English/Spanish bilinguals acquiring an L3 Romance language (Brazilian Portuguese or Italian) after 12-15 hours of classroom L3 exposure. We examine several phenomena that differ between the L3 and Spanish but pattern similarly between the L3 and English within the grammar modules of morphosyntax (e.g., pronominal subjects) and phonology (e.g., intervocalic underlying stops). The crosslinguistic (dis)similarity of the selected phenomena, together with the comparison of data from bilingual groups who differ in age of acquisition and dominance, allow for the evaluation of critical variables in transfer source selection such as global similarity, language status, facilitation, and dominance.

Korean American adult heritage learner’s oral translanguaging practice

Researcher: Hanae Kim

Kim. Hanae. (2022). “Oh, what’s wrong with your Korean?”: Korean American adult heritage learner’s oral translanguaging practice and their counter-experience. In H. Cho & K. Song (Eds.), Korean as a Heritage Language from Transnationalism and Translanguaging Perspectives. Routledge

Linguistic Identity and Literacy Landscape of a Multilingual Community in Chicago 

Researcher: Jill Hallett 

This project focuses on how the literacy landscape reflects the home languages of students and families in one linguistically-diverse community in Chicago. It looks at how linguistic identity is indexed through the community literacy landscape and what language practices are present, privileged, and erased.

“Language, Multimodal Interaction and Transaction: Studies of a Southern Chinese Marketplace.”

Researcher: Xuehua Xiang

This project examines multimodal interaction in the marketplace in a multilingual town at the juncture of urbanization in Southern China.  By analyzing the socializing functions of language in the marketplace outside of and beyond economic dealings, the study additionally documents and depicts the roles of affect and morality in marketplace encounters.