“The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language.”
- J. Michael Straczynski, American screenwriter
My experiences studying and teaching language touch on a variety of disciplines including linguistics, second language acquisition (SLA), cognitive science, psychology, literature, philosophy of language, and media studies.
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Ethnologue has data on over 7100 living languages. Not everybody speaks English. Our approach to foreign languages is important as part of our approach to the world.

Second Language Acquisition

Originally an offshoot of linguistics, second language acquisition (SLA) is still a young field.  In particular, second language (L2) phonology is still in its infancy.  As experimental methods are adopted from cognitive science, psychology, and speech and hearing sciences, quantitative SLA research is rapidly growing due to its new ability to test hypotheses with instruments sensitive enough to detect subtle effects.  With my own research, I aim to examine phonological development in L2 acquisition and explore how phonological information is cognitively represented.

German in Today's World

By choosing to learn German, students gain the opportunity to experience the cultures and minds of about 120 million people who speak some variety of German natively, about 80 million who speak German as a second language, and even to discover the cultural heritage of 50 million people of German descent in America, where German was still the 2nd most-spoken language up until about 100 years ago, when it was the dominant language in many areas of the United States.
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German is the most widely spoken native language in the European Union. 16% of the EU speaks German natively, compared to 13% who speak English natively.
When we consider the shared cultural heritage of North America and the German-speaking world, learning more about German language and culture is a unique way to learn about our own.
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The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

Constructed Languages

Since designing a course on constructed languages (conlangs), I have discovered the relevance of conlangs to a surprising variety of fields.  Conlangs have been made to unite the nations of the world in peace and to conceal secret discussions for secret societies, to color fantasies of faraway utopian lands and to underscore the injustice of displacing extraterrestrial aborigines, to promote equality for women and to discover the secret will of the divine, to discover the original language of Eden and to transcend the limits of human tongues by grafting them with formal logic.
Centuries ago and in today's film industry, conlangs manage to capture the interest of people reaching for something they can't find in natural languages.

Language Standardization, Literacy, and Language Education

In addition to my research and teaching focuses, I am increasingly interested in the history of how languages become standardized, the impacts of literacy on various cultures (positive and negative), and the external factors that influence the field of language education (e.g., politics, funding, cultural attitudes about foreign languages and language purity).