Department Highlights

AMERICAN STUDIES

American Studies continues to grow its robust internship program, placing students in such diverse places as the Springville Art Museum, the Utah State Legislature, the Church History Museum, and the Smithsonian. American Studies looks forward to bringing distinguished scholar Ellen Gruber Garvey as part of the American Studies Lecture Series. Finally, in 2015 American Studies will hold two Writing Workshop sessions for students looking to improve their writing in the discipline and prepare for the profession.

ASIAN AND NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES

Our department successfully sustained a sabbatical Unit Review from which we are currently recovering with only a few minor casualties.

We were privileged to enjoy the association of visiting Arabic professor Sayyed Diafallah January through April 2014. Prof. Diafallah, who specializes in enhancing our students’ spoken Arabic, came to us from The American University in Cairo.

After several years of dedicated service to colleagues and students, Steve Riep passed the Chinese Section Head baton to David Honey.

Both Arabic and Chinese government programs housed in the department continued this year to have a profound impact on the state of their respective languages nationally, including summer intensive outreach programs on campus.

Jim Toronto was appointed Senior Fellow for Islamic Studies, at the International Center for Law & Religious Studies.

Don Parry and Steve Ricks were instrumental in facilitating the recent Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit held at The Leonardo museum in Salt Lake City.

Our Chinese business case team, under the leadership of Prof. Wang Shu-pei, took first place in national competitions this year.

Prof. Van Gessel delivered a keynote speech on Japanese Christian writer Endô Shûsaku for the city of Machida, Japan.

CENTER FOR LANGUAGE STUDIES

LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION

• During the 2013-2014 academic year, the center taught beginning and advanced level classes in 39 different languages. They were: Afrikaans, Armenian, ASL, Bulgarian, Cambodian,

Cebuano, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Fijian, Georgian, Guarani, Hawaiian, Hindi,

Hmong, Hungarian, Indonesian, K’iche, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malagasy, Malay, Mongolian,

Navajo, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Samoan, Serbian, Slovenian, Swahili, Tagalog, Thai, Tongan,

Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Welsh.

• During that year, CLS offered 147 different class sections.

• New languages to be added to the CLS FLang curriculum for the 2014-2015 academic year are

Albanian, Haitian Creole, and Quechua.

LANGUAGE CERTIFICATE PROGRAM

• We awarded our 500th Language Certificate during winter 2013. In fact, we awarded more certificates during the winter semester than we issued throughout 2012. TOTALS TO DATE (As of July 2014) 879 Certificates Have Been Issued!

• As more and more students begin to understand the +Humanities benefits of the Language Certificate, the number of major programs represented has grown.

We currently have recipients from 99 different major

programs across the campus!

Spanish 446 297* Russian 88 13* French 72 40* German 72 12* • During the past couple of years, the Language Portuguese 59 41*

Certificate coordinator has visited many returned Chinese 52 15* missionary language/culture classes to inform students about the program, but those visits Japanese 44 6* interrupted classroom instruction. So beginning Korean 19 5* in fall 2014, we will no longer be visiting classes. Italian 16 8*

Instead, we will launch an email campaign, contacting students enrolled in each of the courses required Arabic 12 6* for the certificate. We have found that students pay more attention to their teachers than to their email, *The number of certificates awarded to so we are hoping that teachers can help publicize Non-Foreign Language Majors. The total the program. For instance, teachers might consider of this column = 443. adding an informational line to their course syllabus, such as, “This is one of the courses that qualifies students for the Language Certificate. For more information see languagecertificate.byu.edu.

• The Language Certificate program began in fall of 2010, and we have issued nearly 900 certificates so far. We will undoubtedly reach our 1,000th award by the end of the year, and we plan to have a One Thousandth Certificate Celebration when we reach that milestone.

LANGUAGE TESTING

• Last calendar year CLS supported College language assessment initiatives by providing a total of 1,176 OPIs and WPTs in 20 different languages. Tests were given to graduating language majors, students in study abroad programs, student interns, Language Certificate applicants, residents of the Foreign Language Houses, applicants to the SLaT MA program, participants in various research projects, and students in departments conducting curriculum reviews.

• The Center hosted the first-ever ACTFL Proficiency Assessments Summer Institute on June 17-20, 2014. Nearly 100 language professionals from all over the United States participated in the 4-day workshops in English, Chinese, French, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. Twenty BYU faculty took advantage of this professional development opportunity and participated in the workshops. Following the training received in the workshops, most of the BYU faculty plan to go through a vigorous certification progress to become certified ACTFL testers.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

• After many years of service, Han Kelling has stepped down as the Director of the Foreign

Language Student Residence. We are grateful for his leadership and his friendly support of the students. We welcome Tony Brown as the new FLSR Director.

• A Federal grant for the creation of Computer Adaptive Tests of Reading and Listening in Arabic and French concluded on June 30, 2014. Test items in each modality for each language were developed to create two non-overlapping test forms. We engaged an external consultant to work with our in-house programmer to refine the test implementation and delivery programming.

ENGLISH

This year’s English Student Symposium in March showcased some of our top students. A truly collaborative experience between faculty and both graduate and undergraduate students, the symposium is one of the department’s assessment tools. More than 125 students presented creative and research papers, with nearly 50 faculty members advising and mentoring. Dr. Sirpa Grierson directed the symposium with the help of the English Society and the Graduate Student Association. The Charles Redd Center provided funding to award students writing the best papers related to Western Studies.

Dr. Grierson also oversaw the publication of Etched in Glass, Illuminated by Light, a booklet featuring a map of and short essays about the artwork and 28 quotations on the English Department Identity Wall. The essays were written by English majors in collaboration with faculty mentors.

FRENCH AND ITALIAN

The department’s annual French Camp hosted 75 students from all over the US (over half from outside Utah) and five from overseas. Students spent 21/2 weeks immersed in French and received instruction from public teachers, BYU faculty and BYU students, including an accelerated class taught by Chantal Thompson.

Scott Sprenger accepted the job of provost and dean at the American University in Paris. He begins his duties there this fall.

GERMAN AND RUSSIAN

Teresa Bell was elected Vice Chair of the Teaching Development Special Interest Group for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Jennifer Bown directed the Nizhny Novgorod, Russia study abroad program.

Cindy Brewer is on professional development leave fall semester 2014.

Tony Brown worked with the following institutions to set up internships for BYU students participating on the Moscow Internship Program: Gorky Institute of World Literature, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Academic Choir at Moscow State University, Gadar Institute for Economic Policy, and KidSave International. He also organized the American delegation for the annual Russian-American conference held at the Russian State University for the Humanities.

Christian Clement and Laura Catharine Smith organized and directed the spring / summer Heidelberg study abroad program.

Michelle James hosted illustrator and graphic designer E.J. Barnes. E.J. gave a lecture titled, “Seeking the von Medems: Historical, Genealogical, and Visual Research for a Graphic Novel on Count Cagliostro in Courland in 1779.” She is currently working on a graphic novel about author Elisa von der Recke and her encounter with Count Cagliostro, a spiritualist who traveled Europe, claiming the ability to summon and speak with spirits.

Grant Lundberg worked on internship development with Tony Brown. They made contacts with the American Chamber of Commerce as well as major companies like Exxon and Chevron in Moscow. Grant received research funding from the US Department of Education and BYU’s Center for the Study of Europe.

Robert McFarland hosted Gabriel Trop (UNC Chapel Hill), Wolfgang Fichna (U Vienna) and Kristin Kopp (U Missouri Columbia) for a BYU master class and workshop on cultural studies and film. Rob also organized a session at the 2014 conference of the Berkeley/Tübingen/Vienna/Harvard Working Group on Cultural Poetics (BTWH).

Mark Purves hosted Yekaterina Jordan from the University of Virginia.

Laura Catharine Smith was one of organizers of the annual Second Language Research Forum (SLRF), held 31 October through 2 November 2013 at the Utah Valley Convention center. She also received a one-year Humanities Center fellowship. Laura spent winter semester 2014 on professional development leave.

Raissa Solovieva hosted Alexandra Sviridova, a director, writer, and film critic from New York. Ms. Sviridova gave three lectures on Russian cinema to students in upper-division courses.

The 39th annual Adventssingen Christmas program took place on Sunday, 1 December 2013 in the DeJong Concert Hall. Kathryn Isaak was the director.

HUMANITIES, CLASSICS, AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Stan Benfell directed BYU’s London Study Abroad this summer and will remain there through December.

George Handley received the Utah Conservation Partner of the Year Award from The Nature Conservancy. He was an invited plenary speaker for “The Future of the Environmental Humanities” at the University of Washington last fall.

Seth Jeppesen displayed his acting and directing abilities in his classroom production of Plautus’ Amphitro. It was met with rave reviews.

Nate Kramer directed a Study Abroad program for the first time to Denmark this summer. He successfully organized Kierkegaard and the Present Age, a conference held at BYU in November.

Francesa Lawson was appointed as section head of Interdisciplinary Humanities.

Roger Macfarlane completed a spring term Study Abroad program to Europe focused on classical antiquity and classical civilization.

Kerry Soper successfully completed four years as section head of Interdisciplinary Humanities. He was an invited plenary speaker at the Festival for Cartoon Art at The Ohio State University in November.

Charlotte Stanford received an honored alumni award from the Pennsylvania State University College of Art and Architecture in April 2014.

LINGUISTICS AND ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Neil Anderson was awarded the 2014 James Alatis Award for Service to TESOL. The award honors outstanding service by TESOL members and is the most prestigious award given by the TESOL International Association.

Alan Melby received the 2013 Alexander Gode Medal from the American Translators Association. This is ATA’s most prestigious award presented to an individual or institution for outstanding service to the translating and interpreting professions.

Wendy Baker Smemoe was awarded the 2014 Faculty Mentoring Award at the BYU’s Faculty Women’s Association banquet on April 23, 2014.

Mark Davies received a large sub-contract to work on an $810,000 grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK titled: Semantic Annotation and Mark Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches (SAMUELS). Mark also continues his work on an NSF-funded project with Doug Biber (Northern Arizona University) titled “A Linguistic Taxonomy of English Web Registers.” He has given invited plenary talks and workshops on his various corpora at Oxford University (for collaboration on the OED), University of Athens (Greece), the University of Indiana, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.

Bill Eggington spent a year-long leave in an appointment as a visiting scholar at Kyung Hee University, Global Campus in South Korea, as part of a faculty-student exchange arrangement that our college has with that university. He taught graduate and undergraduate classes in socio-linguistics, applied corpus linguistics, and language and culture. He conducted research on cross-cultural communication, language planning and policy, and was an invited plenary speaker to the Korean Linguistics Society and the Korea Association of Multi-Media Assisted Language Learning. He presented on forensic linguistics and applied corpus linguistics.

Dee Gardner collaborated with Mark Davies to produce a new Academic Vocabulary List, a corpus-based list of words typically appearing in academic English. In their article appearing in Applied Linguistics, Gardner and Davies describe the list and tell how it can be used in settings where academic English is the focus of instruction.

Our department organized the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) for the BYU site. This olympiad is a contest in which high-school students at designated sites all over the country solve linguistic puzzles. In solving the problems, students learn about the diversity and consistency of language, while exercising logic skills. The top-scoring student from the BYU site placed 26th (out of about 1600) in North America.

PHILOSOPHY

Dr. James Faulconer is serving in London England as the Resident Director of the study abroad program.

Dave Grandy returned from a semester long professional development leave in Germany and will begin teaching again this fall.

Oxford Press published Dr. Dan Graham’s new book Science before Socrates.

We have hired two new adjuncts this year on a temporary basis. Justin White is ABD from UC Riverside, California. He taught Summer Term 2014 and will be returning to Riverside to finish his dissertation. We also have hired Derek Haderlie, who will be teaching for us this fall and winter before he starts his PhD. program in Philosophy next year.

Camilla Dudley joined the Philosophy Department in 2014 as our first student secretary. She has already become a valued member of the department and is very much appreciated.

SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE

MINI COURSES:

The department hosted five very successful week-long mini-courses on the following topics:

• Mary O’Donnell, James Madison University, 21-25 October 2013, “Designing and

Implementing a Standards-Based Spanish Course”

• John Slater, University of Colorado, Boulder, 4-8 November 2013, “From Literature to Case

History: The Baroque Comedia, Science and Medicine”

• Orlando Alba, 24 -28 February 2014, “Unidad y diversidad del español en el Caribe insular: visión sociolingüítica”

• Cecelia Cavanaugh, Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, PA, 17-12 February, “García Lorca”

• Robert Newcomb, UC Davis, 24-28 March 2014, “Theories of Iberia and Latin America”

8th Annual Summer Workshop for Spanish Teachers, 25 and 26 June 2014. More than 100 high school and junior high school Spanish teachers from Utah and surrounding states (two even came from California) attended. Sessions were imparted rom Spanish Resource Center director, graduate students in the Spanish Pedagogy and FlaT MA, and every member of the Spanish Pedagogy section in the Department. Topics included everything from “Performance to Proficiency” to “Tips & Tricks for Moving Students to the Next Level.” And let’s not forget “assessment, assessment, and assessment.”

It was the Department’s turn for the Summer Institute for Spanish Teachers in Spain. Prof. Nieves Knapp directed the group comprised of eight Spanish teachers from Utah and our own graduate students.

James Krause and Frederick G. Williams drafted the application for the establishment of the Portuguese National Honors Society (Phi Lambda Beta) of the AATSP (American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese). Our BYU Chapter is Beta Ypsilon, and Sigma Delta Pi, the Spanish Honor Society, is our sister institution. The inaugural members were recognized at the initiation ceremony on 2 April 2014.

“Brazil Beneath the Surface,” a major semester-long conference and program involving the department, Brigham Young University, and guest speakers outside of BYU. Rex Nielsen, with Frederick G. Williams as a member of the organizing committee, headed up the conference. Prof. Williams was one of the speakers, presenting From Acorn to Oak Tree: the Beginnings of the Remarkable Growth of the Church in Brazil.

Vanessa Fitzgibbon received a 2014 Brigham Award, for her genuine commitment, example, and contributions to others throughout the world and the BYU community.

Robert N. Smead was on professional development leave fall semester 2013. Research in Hawaii on Spanish in the islands.

Jeffrey S. Turley was on professional development leave winter semester 2014.

Blair Bateman was on professional development leave winter semester 2014.

Scott Alvord directed the Fall Semester 2013 Study Abroad program to University of Alcalá, Spain.

Rob Martinsen directed the Spring Term 2014 Study Abroad program to University of Alcalá, Spain.

Daryl Hague directed the Spring Term 2014 Study Abroad program to Mérida, Mexico.