To learn more about what it means to be multilingual, Curriculum Specialist Kim Edmunds interviews Dr. Eva Fernández, Associate Provost for Innovation and Student Success at Queens College, CUNY. You’ll also meet Baruch graduate student Li Ma, who tells us about her experience speaking multiple languages and the rewards and challenges of academic life.
Download the episode transcript here.
Check out the Episode 4 English Supplemental Materials
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Who’s on this episode?
Eva M. Fernández is Associate Provost for Innovation and Student Success (Assistant Vice President) at Queens College, where she works to support innovation in teaching, experiential education, and student success. Here PhD is in Linguistics, from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research is on cross-linguistic aspects of sentence processing, with a focus on syntactic ambiguity and the contribution of prosody to syntactic disambiguation. Another focus is the impact of the second language on the first language of bilinguals. She has also done some work on technology in higher education and is interested in measures of student success.
Further reading from Dr. Fernández and colleagues:
Behrens, S. J. & Fernández, E. M. (in press). Linguistically-informed pedagogy in higher education: A role for teaching and learning centers. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching.
Davison, A., Fernández, E. M., & Goldhaber, S. L. (2010). Academic discourse on a multilingual campus. In J. Summerfield, C. Smith, & E. Martineau (Eds.), Making teaching and learning matter: transformative spaces in higher education (pp. 171-193). Dordrecht: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-90-481-9166-6_10.
Fernández, E. M. & Souza, R. (2016). Walking bilinguals across language boundaries: On-line and off-line techniques. In Heredia, R., Altarriba, J., & Cieslicka, A. B. (Eds.), Methods in bilingual reading comprehension research (pp. 33-60). The Bilingual Mind and Brain Book Series 1. New York, NY: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4939-2993-1_3
Kim Edmunds is the TfCS Curriculum Specialist. She holds an MA in TESOL from Teachers College, Columbia University and a BA in Linguistics and Creative Writing from Emory University. She has been working with ESL learners in various capacities for over 8 years, specializing in teaching speaking and pronunciation skills. At Baruch, she enjoys pursuing her interests in phonetics and phonology, working with English learners in higher education settings, and sharing her passion for finding a voice in a new language. She is also an adjunct faculty member in the Hunter College Master’s in TESOL program and in The New School’s Certificate in Teaching English.
Jessica Coyle is a TfCS Speech Consultant. Jessica received a BA in International Studies from The University of Dayton and a MA in TESOL from The New School University. After teaching English in France and Korea for several years, she has spend the past six years at universities here in the greatest city in the world. She is a passionate language-learner, fitness enthusiast, guinea pig mom, and improviser. She would love to travel to every country in the world, and her favorite phoneme is /s/. She updates the @tfcsbaruch Instagram account – send it a message and say hi!
Our featured student, Li Ma:
Featured image: “Autumn Triangles #7” by Brett Jordan is licensed under CC BY 2.0
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