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Has anyone ever commented on the way you talk or write? Do you remember when you first noticed that other people spoke or wrote differently than you? How do you change the ways you use language to meet your changing needs? In what manner are the ways we use language part of our identities (gender, race, class, education, etc.)? Using a variety of different voices, we'll examine how language shapes our personal and social life by reading literary works that explore the relationships between language, society, politics, and self identities. Potential writers to be studied include George Orwell, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Anzaldua, and Amy Tan. The writing load for this course is a minimum of 15 page of formal revised writing. Prerequisite: ENGL 111 or 121. This course replaces ENGL 112 as the second course in the core Literature and Writing sequence. ENGL 190 students should take an ENGL 205 or above literature course to satisfy the core Literature and Writing requirement.
Has anyone ever commented on the way you talk or write? Do you remember when you first noticed that other people spoke or wrote differently from you? How do you change the ways you use language to meet your changing needs? In what manner are the ways we use language part of our identities (gender, race, class, education, etc.)? Using a variety of different voices, we'll examine how language shapes our personal and social life by reading literary works that explore the relationship between language, society, politics, and self-identities. Potential writers to be studied include George Orwell, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Anzaldua, and Amy Tan. The writing load for this course is a minimum of 15 pages of formal revised writing. Prerequisite: ENGL 111 or 121. This course replaces ENGL 112 as the second course in the core Literature and Writing sequence. ENGL 190 students should take an ENGL 205 or above literature course to satisfy the core Literature and Writing requirement.
In English Studies, we traffic in language--reading, writing, and talking in order to construct meanings in the textual world. Although language is such a central term in our discipline, we rarely step back to analyze how it works in our reading and writing experiences. Linguistic studies in the past decades have offered concepts and tools that help us understand the nature of language and our manipulation of it (from sound to syntax, from pragmatics to politics, from community dialects to individual language use). In this course, we'll examine the structure and use of language, and in the process we will find ways of understanding the relationship between language, thought, and identity (personal, social, and political). To this end, we will consider various theoretical approaches for conceptualizing language, including structuralist, functionalist, generativist, and sociolinguistic models. We will also apply these approaches to analyzing language use in various texts, literary or non-literary. The overarching concern of this course is with how language organizes meanings, relations, and actions for us. No background in linguistics is required. This course counts as elective credit.
Students will read and write about literary texts critically and closely. The course emphasizes recursive reading and writing processes that encourage students to discover, explain, question and clarify ideas. To this end, students will study a variety of genres as well as terms and concepts helpful to close analysis of those genres. They will practice various forms of writing for specific audiences and purposes. Students will reflect on and develop critical awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses as readers and writers.
Students will read and write about literary texts critically and closely. The course emphasizes recursive reading and writing processes that encourage students to discover, explain, question and clarify ideas. To this end, students will study a variety of genres as well as terms and concepts helpful to close analysis of those genres. They will practice various forms of writing for specific audiences and purposes. Students will reflect on and develop critical awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses as readers and writers.
The study of the historical, structural, and semantic features of the English language; systems of English grammar. Required for secondary licensure in communication arts and literature. Prerequisites: ENGL 111 and 112 or 190
Academic History
Ph.D. in English, University of Washington M.A. in English, Kansas State University M.A. in Applied Linguistics, The Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China B.A. The Central University of Nationalities in China, Beijing, China At St. Thomas since 2006
Expertise/Specialties
Discourse Theory and Analysis Linguistics and English Language Study Language and Ideology Rhetoric and Stylistics
Selected Publications
"Collision of Language in News Discourse: A Functional-Cognitive Perspective of Transitivity." Critical Discourse Studies 8.3 (2011): 1-17.
"Verticality, Horizontality, and States of the Self: Cognitive Metaphors for the 'Spatial Self' in Chinese Autobiographical Writings." Metaphor and Symbol 26.1 (2011): 68-95.
“Transitivity and Lexical Cohesion: Press Representations of a Political Disaster and Its Actors.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010): 3444-3458.
“Intertextuality and Nationalist Ideology: Discourse of National Conflicts in News Discourse in the United States and China.” Discourse and Society. 20.1 (2009): 85-122.
"Pidgin and Code-Switching: Linguistic Identities and Multicultural Consciousness in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey." Language and Literature (13:3): 271-289, 2004.
"Virginia Woolf's Narrative Language and Her Androgynous Ideal in Mrs. Dalloway." (In Chinese). Foreign Literature Criticism, Feb. 2004: 17-24, 2004.
Selected Presentations
“The ‘Split Self’ Phenomenon – Cognitive Linguistic Theory and a Cross-cultural Perspective.” American Association for Applied Linguistics 2010 Convention. Atlanta. March 2010 .
“Models of the Self: Metaphor, Culture, and Cross-Linguistic Variation.” Modern Languages Association 2009 Convention. Philadelphia. December 2009.
"Constructing Nationalist Ideologies in the News Media." National Communication Association 2006 Convention. San Antonio, Texas. November 2006.
"Metaphorical Conceptualizations of the Self in English and Chinese." AILA 2005: 14th World Congress of Applied Linguistics. Madison, Wisconsin. July 2005.
"Non-Standard Language Forms in Kingston's Work." Hawaii International Conference on Social Sciences. Honolulu, Hawaii. June 2004.
Membership in Professional Organizations
Modern Language Association American Association for Applied Linguistics National Communication Association