On Tuesday, November 26, 2019, at 11 AM in Robert Bell 361, the English department will present three special-assigned leave lectures by Drs. Megumi Hamada, Deborah Mix, and Mary Lou Vercellotti.

Dr. Hamada

Dr. Megumi Hamada will present a lecture on “Learning words from reading: Cognitive model of word-meaning inference.” How does your mind work when you are reading? The presentation introduces Hamada’s book in progress and a related project in computational analysis.

Dr. Mix

Dr. Deborah Mix‘s presentation is titled “Harryette Mullen’s Ecopoetics.” Of her presentation, Dr. Mix says, “Harryette Mullen approaches poetry as a way to engage her readers in a shared political project, generally one with feminist and antiracist goals. Urban Tumbleweed fits clearly into this approach, centering a black female experience of the city and landscape and using those experiences to challenge all readers to reconsider their habits of seeing and understanding the world around them, reminding us that what we perceive as “natural” may instead be the product of interlocking systems of power.”

Dr. Vercellotti

Dr. Mary Lou Vercellotti‘s talk is titled “What are we measuring:  Language proficiency or the prompt?” Of her talk, Vercellotti says, “In the study of emerging bilinguals’ proficiency, speech data are rich because speech includes linguistic information which reflects cognitive processes underlying language use. Learners are often given a prompt to elicit language when researchers conduct language learning research and when instructors test language learning. The impact of the prompt on the language performance is called prompt effects.”

This event is free and open to the public.