Susan J. Blake has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from UBC (2001) and has done fieldwork and research on a number of Central Coast Salishan languages — most notably Sliammon, Homalco, and Downriver Halkomelem (Musqueam dialect). Her dissertation research focused on the distribution of schwa in Sliammon and the morpho-phonological constraints that govern its occurrence. She has taught at the university level for over fifteen years in three closely related areas: Linguistics, First Nations Language Education, and English Language Studies. She spent five years overseas at Effat University, an innovative private women’s university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where she served as Director of the Research and Consultancy Institute, and Chair of Saudi Heritage Research. Current research interests include the integration of research into undergraduate teaching and learning, language revitalization with a focus on minority languages and cultures, creativity as it relates to the human language faculty, and the study of cognitive metaphors.

WRDS 150 Research Area: Linguistic Landscapes

WRDS 150A

Linguistic Landscapes: Reading, Writing and Research on Human Language

Topic: Linguistic Landscapes — Language Endangerment, Maintenance, Documentation, Revitalization; Language & Identity

“Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.”

Edward Sapir (1921, p. 220)

In this section of WRDS 150A, students will explore the types of questions and lines of inquiry pursued by language researchers in Anthropology, Education, First Nations Studies, and Linguistics. Through a series of academic readings, writing-intensive exercises, and opportunities for discussion and critical response, students will have a framework in which to develop their own questions about language and learn about the research and writing practices of language researchers across the disciplines. How do language researchers from different disciplines formulate research questions? What kinds of data do they incorporate in scholarly journal articles? How are the data and their research findings presented in written form? What are the formal properties of their scholarly writing?

This course focuses on corpus construction and discourse analysis (method) & provides relevant examples from research articles in the Humanities and Social Sciences as a point of departure.

Students will build their own working corpus (research articles on a particular topic) and analyze this textual material. They will have opportunities to draft and revise and present their own original research findings in both oral and written forms. Research will be carried out either collaboratively (2-3 students per research team) or individually (1 student per team), and provides students with opportunities to reflect on their own research and writing practices, as they become apprentice members of different research communities on campus.

WRDS 150B

Linguistic Landscapes — Scholarly Research Practices, Language Use, and Disciplinarity:
A Corpus-Based Discourse-Analytic Perspective

This course aims to explore the question of how scholars in a variety of different disciplines within the university use language to write up their research results in the form of academic research articles (RAs).  This course also connects scholarly writing practices (academic literacy) with a wide-range of scholarly research practices, and views academic writing as a “complex social activity” that takes both content and context into consideration.

We engage in asking the following kinds of questions: How do researchers from different disciplines formulate research questions? What kinds of research methods do they use? What kinds of data (evidence) do they incorporate in scholarly research articles? How are those scholarly research articles organized? How are the data and their research findings presented in written and/or visual form? What is the relationship between the authors and their intended readers? What kinds of scholarly activities are researchers engaged in?

This course focuses on corpus construction and discourse analysis (method) & provides relevant examples from the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) as a point of departure.

Students will build their own working corpus (research articles from their own discipline) and analyze this textual material. They will have opportunities to draft and revise and present their own original research findings in both oral and written forms. Research will be carried out either collaboratively (2-3 students per research team) or individually (1 student per team), and provides students with opportunities to reflect on their own research and writing practices, as they become apprentice members of different research communities on campus.