Hiatus

LaTeX tutorial January 22nd: report

Joe Roy and Rob Truswell ran a LaTeX tutorial on Monday 22nd for approximately 15 graduate students. It was a great success, and LaTeX was learned. Rob held a second tutorial on January 28th for those unable to attend the first. So, if you still do not know LaTeX, it is NOT their fault.

 

Youth Futures - Avenir Jeunesse

There is a program on campus called Youth Futures (Avenir Jeunesse). It provides a post-secondary experience to first-generation youth. From official program publicity:"This program offers first-generation youth a post-secondary experience, leadership and volunteer opportunities as well as summer employment opportunities. [The] participants are determined and motivated high school students that have already completed the leadership portion of the program and are about to start their summer employment. [The program offers its] participants a post-secondary experience where they will discover various topics, faculties, and services offered through presentations and activities. We wish to offer an experience that will show the youth how rewarding and attainable post-secondary education can be. Therefore, we are looking for professors who can inspire the youth with their personality, passion and knowledge."

On the 15th of August, Prof. Ian MacKay met with a group of approximately 25 students enrolled in the program to talk about Linguistics for an hour. The students showed a great deal of interest in the topic of linguistics; virtually all the students were native speakers of a language other than English or French. Few had even been aware that the field even existed, and were enthralled to learn about it. There were lots of questions and comments by the group. One student asked if she could combine a major or minor in Linguistics with the science degree she was already planning to take! Even a couple of the UO student employees of the program who sat in said that they wished they could add some linguistics courses to their degree program.

Open door University of Ottawa - Friday March 16th

The U of Ottawa Spring Open House event offers a wide range of activities to help students  familiarize themselves with the uOttawa campus.

For the Department of Linguistics, the following tours will be taking place.

Linguistics – Tour of the Department and laboratories, 10am

Linguistique – Visite guidée du Département et des laboratoires - 13h

Linguistics – Tour of the Department and laboratories English, 2:30 p.m.

AW.. what?

The Academic Writing Help Centre (AWHC) is a resource centre for all the students of the university.  Its mandate is not to edit or improve students' essays, but to help students improve their writing skills.
You can make an appointment to get some help at any stage of the writing process, be it if you have problems brainstorming, if you want to work on your grammar or even just to get clarifications on how to cite references.  The service is offered to all students of the university, but special workshops and thesis support groups are offered to graduate students, and a reserved space for reading, studying, group meetings is also available.  Moreover, there are some reference books you can consult and four computers you can use. You are welcome to suggest to the undergrads in the classes you teach or
tutor to use this service if you feel that they would benefit from it.

I also encourage you to use it yourself.  Had I known more about it before, I would have probably used it and saved some time when writing my MA memoir.

For those of you who feel that they are competent enough to teach others, working there is also a  possibility.  I have been doing so since September, and I never thought that reading essays could be that much fun! Work is never boring: you get to meet people from all faculties, with different backgrounds and aspirations.  Every student who comes for an appointment has their own problems and finding a way to explain the solution to them so that they understand is always a challenge.  It's one thing to realize that a sentence doesn't make sense; it's another one to be able to explain to the student why it is so.  In this case, I find my background in linguistics quite helpful because I can face the problems from a different angle than if I had a traditional grammarian point of view.

Finally, I would like to point out that such writing centres exists in many universities in Canada and the U.S, so keep this in mind as a career option…

Pascale April

Photos from Eta Schneiderman's Undergrad Poster Session

This year Undergraduate Poster Session for Neurolinguistics was very successful. Please see the photo album here.

Something different in my life by Keiko Kaku

Finally the Japanese language course is back at the University of Ottawa !

Since my research is on second language acquisition, I always wanted to teach Japanese and luckily I got the opportunity to teach one of the three sections this semester.

Fortunately, all three sections were full and each of them has around 35 students which is quite big for a language class. On the first day of class, I was very excited, but also very nervous. To begin with, I introduced myself and asked my students why they were studying Japanese. As expected, everybody had different reasons and interests but one thing in common was that they were eager to learn the Japanese language and culture. I was also amazed that almost all the students really wanted to go to Japan someday. This gives them a good motivation to study! I believe that motivation and passion are very powerful elements to achieve one’s goal and I could feel that in the students (well, I should say “many of the students” ^^).

Teaching definitely gives me something different in my Ph.D life. This makes me think not only about the Japanese language, but also about Japanese culture and manners. For example, students ask me questions such as “How deep should I bow when I meet Japanese people for the first time?” I did not expect this kind of question to come in the class (but I demonstrated in the class anyways).

Overall, I very much enjoyed teaching Japanese and consider it a precious experience. This is not only beneficial for my research (L2 acquisition) but also for my Ph.D life because it brings me a lot of interaction with students who really want to learn. I truly hope that I could help them to keep studying the language and someday they exchange their culture with Japanese people as well (hopefully in Japanese).