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SoCIOLing Lab Year in Review 2020-2021!
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Amazonian Spanish: Language Contact and Evolution explores the unique origins, linguistic features, and geo-political situation of the Spanish that has emerged in the Amazon. While this region boasts much linguistic diversity, many of the indigenous languages found within its limits are now being replaced by Spanish. This situation of language expansion, contact, and bilingualism is reshaping the sociolinguistic landscape of the Amazon by creating a number of Spanish varieties with innovative linguistic features that require closer scholarly attention. The current book documents this situation in detail. The chapters in this volume include work on distinct geographical regions of the Amazon, with primary data collected using different methodologies and language contact situations. The scholars in this volume specialize in an array of fields, including anthropological linguistics, bilingualism, language contact, dialectology, and language acquisition. Their work represents both formal and functional approaches to linguistics.
“Bridging the Gap: Bilingual Education and Community Engagement” investigates dual language immersion in North Carolina’s elementary and secondary schools. As a graduate of ECU’s Engagement and Outreach Scholars Academy, Dr. Fafulas is advancing our understanding of emerging bilingual communities in the U.S. South.
Two ECU students, Anna Lawrence (undergraduate) and Ashley Meehan (graduate), won the “Best Paper Presentation Award” at the 13th Annual TESOL / Applied Linguistics Graduate Students Conference hosted at East Carolina University on February 13, 2016. Their paper, entitled Morphosyntactic Variation in an Emerging Dialect of Spanish in Eastern North Carolina, reports on findings from an ongoing study that investigates the formation of Spanish communities in the rural south. This research is being conducted under the mentorship of Dr. Stephen Fafulas, current Director of the SoCIOLing Lab.
We are pleased to announce that SLINKI, Spanish Linguistics in North Carolina, will be hosted at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, on February 7, 2015. We invite abstracts for 20-minute presentations and for poster presentations, in any area related to Spanish Linguistics. While the focus of the conference is on work by researchers in North Carolina, we welcome all submissions. Sessions will be held throughout the day and will not be scheduled concurrently unless necessitated by the number of presenters. The poster session will be held during the lunch break.
As part of the SoCIOLing Lab’s mission to embrace the growing needs of the Hispanic population in our region and deepen relationships between students, schools, and community partners we are preparing for a three day visit with Dr. Kathryn Lindholm-Leary who will provide consultation on our research initiatives regarding bilingual education and dual-language programs in eastern NC.
Dr. Kathryn Lindholm-Leary is currently Professor Emerita of Child and Adolescent Development at San Jose State University. She has worked with two-way immersion and other foreign language and bilingual programs for the past 30 years and during that time has evaluated over 40 programs and helped to establish programs in over 60 school districts in 15 states. Dr. Lindholm-Leary regularly consults with various state and local departments of education.
Welcome to eastern NC and ECU Dr. Lindholm-Leary!