Monthly Archives: January 2021

From History to English

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We have so many amazing Graduate Assistants in our department! Some teach, some do other things, and some work for the Write Place, our SCSU Writing Center designed to help students of all levels improve their writing!

Read below, an experience from one of our GAs working in the Write Place!

I have been a history student at St. Cloud for a few years and I loved my experience so much that now I am a history graduate student! One of my history professors thought I might be a good fit to be a graduate assistant with the English Department.  I was hesitant at first, but after talking with people in the English Department, especially Tim in The Write Place, I thought I could make it work.  Once the semester began and I started meeting with students, I realized how helpful these sessions could be for the student and for myself.  I think I have learned a lot working with the English Department this semester! I look forward to working more with the other coaches and English Department staff as I continue to work on my master’s.  I will always love my History Department relationships, but I am so happy to develop new relationships with the English Department as well!

–Jennifer Sonterre

For more information about the Write Place, visit their website or follow them on Twitter and Facebook!

From the SCSU Write Place website:

“The St. Cloud State writing centers provide free services to support any of the writing and reading you do in and outside of school. We work with writers from all levels of experience and ability at any stage in the writing process. Our purpose is to help you become a more effective, versatile, and confident communicator. 

Most students who visit the writing center schedule appointments to discuss papers that they’re writing for their classes. Some want help getting started. Some have begun writing and are ready to discuss next steps. Some bring drafts that are nearly finished and need help with documenting sources and fine-tuning the language. 

The graduate and undergraduate writing coaches on our staff have been trained to provide this kind of guidance, and they will collaborate with you in making many other kinds of writing decisions.”

This semester, the Write Place offers both in-person and online consultation! Consider checking them out!

Ettien Koffi, Ph.D. – Newest Book

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Check out this message from one of our faculty members!

Happy New Year!   I have some good news to share with you.  My book: Relevant Acoustic Phonetics of L2 English: Focus on Intelligibility has been published by CRC Press, the Science Publishing Imprint of Routledge.

 

From the back of the book:

Intelligibility is the ultimate goal of human communication. However, measuring it objectively remained elusive until the 1940s when physicist Harvey Fletcher pioneered a psychoacoustic methodology for doing so. Another physicist, von Bekesy, demonstrated clinically that Fletcher’s theory of Critical Bands was anchored in anatomical and auditory reality. Fletcher’s and Bekesy’s approach to intelligibility has revolutionized contemporary understanding of the processes involved in encoding and decoding speech signals. Their insights are applied in this book to account for the intelligibility of the pronunciation of 67 non-native speakers from the following language backgrounds –10 Arabic, 10 Japanese, 10 Korean, 10 Mandarin, 11 Serbian and Croatian “the Slavic Group,” 6 Somali, and 10 Spanish speakers who read the Speech Accent Archive elicitation paragraph. Their pronunciation is analyzed instrumentally and compared and contrasted with that of 10 native speakers of General American English (GAE) who read the same paragraph. The data-driven intelligibility analyses proposed in this book help answer the following questions – Can L2 speakers of English whose native language lacks a segment/segments or a suprasegment/ suprasegments manage to produce it/them intelligibly? If they cannot, what segments or suprasegments do they use to substitute for it/them? Do the compensatory strategies used interfere with intelligibility?

The findings reported in this book are based on nearly 12,000 measured speech tokens produced by all the participants. This includes some 2,000 vowels, more than 500 stop consonants, over 3,000 fricatives, nearly 1,200 nasals, about 1,500 approximants, over 1,200 syllables onsets, as many as 800 syllable codas, more than 1,600 measurement of F0/pitch, and duration measurements of no fewer than 539 disyllabic words. These measurements are in keeping with Baken and Orlikoff (2000:3) and in accordance with widely accepted Just Noticeable Difference thresholds, and relative functional load calculations provided by Catforda (1987).

Ettien Koffi, Ph.D. linguistics, teaches at Saint Cloud State University, Minnesota. He is the author of four books and author/co-author of several dozen articles. His acoustic phonetic research is synergetic, encompassing L2 acoustic phonetics of English (Speech Intelligibility from the perspective of the Critical Band Theory), sociophonetics of Central Minnesota English, general acoustic phonetics of Anyi (West African language), acoustic phonetic feature extraction for application in Automatic Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech, Voice Biometrics, and Intelligent Systems.

Call for Proposals – Minnesota Writing and English

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Minnesota Writing and English

Call for Proposals
           
for Zoom Conference Thursday-Friday, March 25-26, 2021
         
“Reinvent, Reinvest, Reinvigorate: Teaching after 2020”

Proposals due Sunday midnight, January 24, 2021

We welcome your proposal–no matter your state or region of the country–for the 2021 MnWE Zoom Conference Thursday-Friday, March 25-26! Please go to www.MnWE.org by January 24 to send it to us. Registration for attending the conference will open soon.

MnWE is a warm, welcoming professional organization emphasizing friendly, respectful discussion and exchange of information. We accept almost all presentations: especially, this year, those that use the theme. The annual, two-day MnWE Conference is an Upper Midwest regional event centered in Minnesota, but open to people from any state or country. Past conferences have featured speakers and presenters from a variety of places and nations. This Zoom conference, in particular, is a great opportunity to practice presenting, prepare for a future presentation, or share your knowledge from your work or a past conference, no matter your geographic location.

This year, our conference theme is “Reinvent, Reinvest, Reinvigorate: Teaching after 2020.” The year 2020 imposed an involuntary reset on academe: an opportunity to take stock of our pedagogy, adapt what needs a refresh, and create new techniques and tools for tutoring and teaching Composition, Literature, and Creative Writing. Our MnWE theme invites you to share your experiences in keeping English and Writing education vital for students during a pandemic, economic disruptions, demands for law enforcement reform, and more.

Our theme also encourages you to look to the future. Social justice, health, and economic crises have illuminated our nation’s disparities in both higher education and high schools. Health and safety concerns and financial uncertainties threaten our students, our colleagues and coworkers, and us. How will the lessons and experiences of the past year transform our teaching

We welcome proposals responding to the theme “Reinvent, Reinvest, and Reinvigorate: Teaching after 2020” for teaching Literature, Writing, or ESL/ELL/MLL; tutoring students online or in writing centers; or building relationships between high school and college-level English and Writing. You may address questions such as

 

  • What have you had to reinvent for your socially distanced or virtual classrooms and individual work with students, and how might those revised strategies inform your teaching beyond present emergencies?
  • How have you made your English courses work for nonnative English speakers and other students who faced educational challenges even before the pandemic added barriers to learning?
  • How are you responding to recent and long-standing demands to end systemic racism in our justice systems and beyond?
  • How should we wisely reinvest our time, energy, and resources in schools?
  • What can we do to alleviate student debt and lift graduate students’ wages and career prospects?
  • What place do unions have in this profession, and how do we talk about labor history and economic justice in our courses?
  • With the pandemic accelerating the turn to online education, what will be the value of face-to-face campus life going forward from 2020?
  • How will we equip students with research and critical thinking skills for sifting through conflicting accounts or disinformation to make sense of chaotic times and reach informed and thoughtful conclusions?


Roundtable Breakouts

The entire conference will be held via Zoom. For this virtual event, breakouts will be somewhat different. With the goal of making the conference as interactive and engaging as possible, all sessions will be 60-minute roundtable discussions: three to five discussants will have several minutes each to address the breakout’s topic, and the remainder of the session to exchange their views with each other and respond to questions from other participants.

Proposals

You may submit a proposal on behalf of a group or as an individual; proposals by individuals will be grouped into topic-appropriate roundtables.  Groups should prepare an approximate 200-word proposal that summarizes the presentation and explains its value to teachers of English and writing. Individuals should prepare an approximate 100-word proposal.

Please submit your proposal by Sunday midnight, January 24, at www.mnwe.org. If you have questions, let us know at any email address below.

The MnWE Committee
—
Richard Jewell, General Coordinator, jeweL001@umn.edu or richard@jewell.net
Larry Sklaney, Conference Coordinator, larry.sklaney@century.edu
Danielle Hinrichs, Program Coordinator, danielle.hinrichs@metrostate.edu
Gordon Pueschner, Volunteer Coordinator, gordon.pueschner@century.edu
Jana Rieck, Communications Coordinator, janaL.rieck@yahoo.com
Heidi Burns, Registration Coordinator, heidi.burns@mnsu.edu