Here are a few of our current graduate students along with their current projects and/or interests.
Evan Ashworth
I am primarily interested in issues pertaining to language revitalization, especially with repsect to languages of the Southwest. My dissertation will address the role of orthographies in language revitalization programs, with particular attention paid to Tewa. Outside of linguistics, my interests include soccer, skiing, and crossword puzzles.
Susan Brumbaugh
I am primarily interested in the phonetics and phonology of Chicano English, specifically within Albuquerque and New Mexico. I teach ESL classes at UNM's Center for English Language and American Culture, where my two favorite classes are Grammar and Conversation. I also teach a Linguistics 101 section which I really enjoy because I remember my own experiences in Ling101 very fondly. That class was what got me into linguistics and got me to New Mexico! In my freetime, I like to ride bikes, play soccer, and hang out with my dog.
Laura Hirrel
The reality that the majority of the world's languages are under threat and in danger of disappearing has made language revitalization my primary interest in linguistics. I am currently involved in a project working towards the revitalization of the O'odham language, which is spoken in southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. One of the goals of the project is to make O'odham language materials accessible to all community members through the use of information technology. Additionally, the project hopes to develop teaching materials to assist in revitalization and to provide an online resource center where community members, who are dispersed across the large land area where O'odham is spoken, can come together and speak the language. I am also interested in the use of corpora for the purpose of language revitalization. Corpora can be useful in helping to develop more practical teaching materials for languages by incorporating the language speakers actually use into lesson plans.
Gesture research is another major interest of mine. I am particularly interested in crosslinguistic differences in co-speech gestures and how linguistic structure affects what information gets encoded into manual gestures. I hope to investigate this topic in my dissertation by considering several languages that have not been included in the research on gesture.
When I'm not busy with linguistics, I enjoy canoeing, hiking, scuba diving, cooking, and traveling around to watch baseball.
Amy Lindstrom
Amy completed her Master's degree in Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004, during which time she received her TOEFL certification and maintained an assistantship teaching Italian. After completing her Master's degree, Amy dug her backpack out of the closet and wandered around the world for more than a year. She found herself in Guatemala when the money finally ran out, and 45 hours of chicken buses later, wound up crossing the Mexico-U.S. border into Brownsville, Texas. She took a job teaching Composition, English Grammar, and Linguistics at the University of Texas-Brownsville (UTB), where she worked as an adjunct instructor and full-time faculty member in the English department. In addition, she taught ESOL for four years at the Language Institute, also affiliated with UTB. There she taught writing, grammar, conversation, and preparation for the TOEFL and ACT. She lived on South Padre Island and contented herself in her spare time with fishing, swimming, surfing, sailing, and kayaking. Amy is currently pursuing the Doctorate in Linguistics at UNM and is thrilled to be teaching ESL at CELAC and serving as a discussion leader in Linguistics. In her free time, she enjoys cooking Thai food, composing and playing classical piano, studying languages, and spinning poi.
PhD students in the Educational Linguistics Department
Pei-ni Lin Causarano
Pei-ni Causarano’s research is informed by more than 10 years of service in public schools and higher education, where she has worked as a K-12 teacher, ESL teacher, and Chinese teacher in Taiwan and the US. As an interdisciplinary educator and researcher, her research agenda covers topics related to language and education from sociocultural perspectives, including cross-linguistic developments in L2 learners, language acquisition in students with specific language impairments, discourse analyses of on-line discussions, and second language pedagogies. Pei-ni is currently teaching Chinese at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and working at Field Services for pre-service teachers. During leisure time, she loves cooking, swimming, yoga and reading stories for her little boy.
Jannette Hermina
I am doing my data collection (field work) in schools in Puerto Rico. I did my BA in English linguistics and my MA in English Education at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. I am a Spanish / English bilingual. I am interested and learning Italian. I like teaching Spanish and ESL. My interests are cooking, gardening, running, and Latin American/ Spanish films.
Tae Kunisawa
My major academic interests are: How can theories and research contribute to language development in L1 and L2? How does integration of SCT and linguistic relativity denote to improving the language? How is gesture associated with memory and SCT with linguistic relativity? In order to pursue these interests, I have worked on the following areas
1) Sociocultural theory (SCT): SCT is an excellent theory to investigate how languages develop. For instance, Vygotsky suggests that language and thought have a distinct root and that those are socially originated. 2) Linguistic relativity: Linguistic relativity suggests that language shapes thought. For example, Chinese speakers' mental processes of time are vertical. Conversely, English is horizontal. Chinese characters indicate the process. Japanese also process time vertically, however it seems that the process are different from that of the Chinese. 3) Gesture: Gestures research suggests that gestures are effective to acquire lexical memory and that gesture reveals speakers' thinking in different cultures. My personal interests include origami, Japanese tea ceremony, puppet shadow show, and Chinese herbal therapy.