Language Revitalization

Abstract:  This talk focuses on blindness as a source of diversity in linguistics teaching and research. I will highlight how enhancing the accessibility of our field enables greater participation, which then feeds back into broader and more diverse research perspectives. I will begin by discussing my work on IPA Braille (Englebretson 2009), which sought to improve general access to our field for blind students and professionals. I will then turn to a discussion of braille as a tactile writing system, and what the unique aspects of (English) braille orthography contribute to the cognitive and reading sciences (e.g. Fischer-Baum and Englebretson 2016). I will conclude with a brief introduction to an ongoing federally-funded multi-disciplinary research project that seeks to address some of the potential barriers to braille literacy (Fischer-Baum, Englebretson, and Holbrook).

Bio:  Robert Englebretson is currently the chair of the Linguistics Department at Rice University, where he teaches courses in morphosyntax, discourse, and grammar in social interaction. He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 2000 from the University of California Santa Barbara. His earlier research interests focused primarily on how language use motivates and constrains language form; stance and identity; discourse and grammar; and interactional linguistics.  He has done fieldwork in Indonesia, and has authored a book and several articles on Colloquial Indonesian grammar.

Although Englebretson is a life-long braille reader, his interest in braille as a research topic only began to emerge in 2006 when he was appointed to serve as the US representative to the International Council on English Braille Committee on Linguistics and Foreign Languages. Under the auspices of that organization, he revised and published a braille version of the IPA, to empower better access to phonetics for blind and visually-impaired people working in language-related fields. In November 2019, the Braille Authority of North America recognized Englebretson with the Darleen Bogart Braille Excellence Award for his work on IPA Braille. 

Also in 2019, a team of researchers including Englebretson, Simon Fischer-Baum (Rice University) and Cay Holbrook (University of British Columbia) were awarded an Exploration research grant from the Institute for Education Sciences (AWARD No. R324A190093) “Exploring the Knowledge, Skills, and Strategies Teachers of Students with Visual Impairments Needto Effectively Teach Braille Reading and Writing.”Englebretson’s current work seeks to bring braille research squarely into the mainstream of the reading sciences, and to contribute to evidence based approaches to improving braille literacy.

Abstract:  In this presentation I present my journey as a deaf linguist in North America and how experiences along the way have influenced my current theoretical preferences and practices in the work I do. These include having to push down feelings of rejection each time I read a generalist work on linguistics and finding no mention of signed language (especially when they are discussing “all human languages”); working on a dictionary project with Kenyan Sign Language users and considering how to make it theirs; thinking about how to textually represent a signed language that, like many others, have not been conventionally written down; and navigating how to document language use in today’s apocarevolutiondemic world in a project I’ve named from the ASL signs “document” “covid” - “O5S5”. Along the way, I muse on what it means to be inclusive and how tricky this is (e.g., for us “there’s no one way to be deaf”). And how important it is for our field and communities we work with to recognize and respect what should be a wide range of work reflecting what kind of lives are actually being lived and being meaningfully done by people living these lives. 

Bio:  Julie A. Hochgesang is an associate professor of Linguistics at Gallaudet University. She is a Deaf linguist who works on documentation of signed languages, ethics of working with signed language communities and making linguistics accessible to the communities.  She has contributed to ongoing efforts to create accessible collections for the ASL communities such as the Sign Language Annotation, Archiving and Sharing projectwhich led to the creation of ASL Signbank, a publicly accessible website of signs linked to ID glosses to be used for annotation of ASL video datasets. Her most recent ASL documentation projects include the “Motivated Look at Indicating Verbs in ASL (MoLo” and “Gallaudet University Documentation of ASL (GUDA)”.  She also consults with Deaf communities on documentation projects like the Philadelphia Signs projectand Haitian Sign Language Documentation Project (LSHDoP)

Abstract:  In this presentation, I show how linguistics pedagogy can function as a “liberatory practice” (bell hooks) and pathway toward social transformation, especially for students who are themselves linguistically minoritized. I begin by outlining some lessons learned from my initial pedagogical training in sociolinguistic justice during my 5 years spent teaching in UC Santa Barbara’s SKILLS (School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society) program, including the limits of an individualistic “error-correction”/“mythbusting” approach to linguistics education. We will then discuss an undergraduate Language and Social Justice course that I taught for the first time in Fall 2020, at a moment when students (and I) were reeling from multiple overlapping social crises. I recount the decision-making process behind my choice to redesign the course around the linguistic aspects of these ongoing crises: language access and healthcare for d/Deaf communities and users of minoritized spoken languages during COVID; the linguistic components of police brutality against Black and Indigenous communities, d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing people, and non-English speakers; and the roles of media discourse and metaphor theory in the rise of far-right populism, among others. By bringing linguistics scholarship into conversation with topics not typically discussed in a linguistics classroom, such as transformative justice and abolitionism, mutual aid, and direct action, the course is structured to guide students away from despair towards activism and social change. I conclude by laying out several necessary considerations for those interested in incorporating a social justice approach in their own linguistics pedagogy, including ways to weave these issues throughout the linguistics curriculum.

Bio:  Anna Bax is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at California State University, Long Beach. She received her PhD in Linguistics from UC Santa Barbara in 2020. She studies language and identity with Tu’un Savi (Mixtec)-speaking communities in California, with a particular focus on language ideologies, dialect contact, and multilingual youth identity and language maintenance practices in a context of rapid language shift. She has also worked on community-led language reclamation, documentation, and maintenance projects. She regularly teaches an upper-division Language and Social Justice course at CSULB and previously spent several years teaching a sociolinguistic justice-based curriculum to high school and community college students through UCSB’s School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society (SKILLS) program.