Research Institute for the Study of Language in an Urban Society, CUNY Graduate Center

People

Ricardo Otheguy

Director
Personal Website

Ricardo Otheguy is professor of Linguistics at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. His publications in theoretical linguistics are in the areas of Spanish linguistics, functional grammar, and the Spanish of the United States. His publications in applied linguistics have been in the area of bilingual education and the teaching of Spanish to native speakers of Spanish.

Professor Otheguy has participated in national and international conferences throughout the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, and has lectured and conducted research in universities and research centers in several countries, including Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain and Uruguay.

Prof. Otheguy is the founding director of the CUNY Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society, which conducts basic and applied research in urban linguistics, bringing to bear the research resources of the City University of New York on urban language issues.

He is the author of numerous research papers that have appeared in the major research journals and anthologies. He is co-editor of Language Across Cultures/Cultures Across English: A reader in cross cultural communication. He has developed textbook materials for the teaching of Spanish to Latino students in the United States, and is co-author of Tu Mundo: Curso para hispanohablantes, and of Prueba de ubicación para hispanohablantes. He has also written Spanish materials for English speaking students, and is co-author of the most widely used high school Spanish textbook in the U.S., En español.

He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the City University of New York (1976), as well as degrees and diplomas in Spanish from Louisiana State University, the City College of New York, and the University of Madrid, Spain.

Funded Projects:
- The Interaction of Language and Dialect Contact: Variable Use of Spanish Subject Pronouns in Six Spanish Dialects in New York City
- English Literacy Predictors Within and Across Languages

Gita Martohardjono

Associate Director
Personal Website

Gita Martohardjono is associate professor of Linguistics at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her area of specialization and research is second language acquisition, in particular, the acquisition of syntax by non-native speakers. Her publications have focused on the cross-linguistic comparison of the development of sentence structure from the perspective of generative theory.

She is Co-director of the Second Language Acquisition Lab at the CUNY Graduate Center, and is currently collaborating on several research projects within and outside the City University system. One grant-funded project investigates the development and use of tense, aspect and pronoun reference across second language (L2) learners of different age groups, concentrating specifically on the differences in attainment between child and adult L2 learners from a wide range of native language backgrounds, including Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Thai and Indonesian. She is PI on an NSF-funded study comparing the neural electrophysiology in the processing of syntax by native speakers of English and ESL learners whose native language is Spanish. This study is linked to an ongoing collaboration with brain imaging laboratories at MIT, Columbia and Cornell. In addition, she is conducting a longitudinal study investigating the impact of syntactic knowledge on the development of reading comprehension skills and biliteracy in elementary school children . This study is funded by the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS), of which she is Associate Director.

Professor Martohardjono has extensive experience in language and literacy-related pedagogy, as well. She teaches in the MA program at Queens College which certifies teachers of English as a Second Language; she has directed the summer ESL program at MIT’s Sloan School of Business; and she is developing a curriculum and teacher-training program at John Bowne High School targeting ESL students who are at risk of failing the Social Studies Regents examination.

She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Cornell University and an M.A. from Universite de Montreal, Canada.

Funded Projects:
- The Role of Syntax in Reading Comprehension: A Study of Bilingual Readers.

Laura Callahan

Research Fellow
Laura Callahan received a Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics in 2001 from the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the faculty of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the City College as Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics in 2003. She has also taught at the Graduate Center-CUNY, UC Berkeley, San José State University, and Michigan State University. Her research has focused on language attitudes, codeswitching, and heritage language maintenance. Her publications include the book Spanish/English Codeswitching in a Written Corpus (John Benjamins, 2004), and articles in Hispania, Language & Communication, Sintagma: Revista de Lingüística, Southwest Journal of Linguistics, The Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and Intercultural Pragmatics. As a RISLUS Research Fellow, she has been Principal Investigator on the projects Language Choice in Interethnic Communication: Spanish and English in New York City Service Encounters; Student Perceptions of Non-Native vs. Native Speaker Language Instructors: A Comparison of ESL and Spanish; and U.S. Latinos’ Use of Written Spanish: Realities and Aspirations.
She is currently working on two projects: Spanish/English Codeswitching in Telephone Service Encounters: Reactions to Native and Non-Native Speakers of Spanish, and Increasing the Effectiveness of Spanish-Language Healthcare Materials: Documenting the Problem and Finding a Solution. In addition to her research activities, in Fall 2005 Professor Callahan designed and taught a RISLUS-sponsored seminar entitled Language and Identity.

Kate Menken

Research Fellow
Personal Website

Kate Menken is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) at Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY). This position is shared equally with the CUNY Graduate Center, where Kate is a Research Fellow at the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society.
Kate received a doctorate in education (Ed.D.) in 2005 from Teachers College, Columbia University in International Education, specializing in Bilingual/Bicultural Education. Her dissertation is entitled When the Test is What Counts: How High-Stakes Testing Affects Language Policy and the Education of English Language Learners in High School. She received first place dissertation awards from the National Association for Bilingual Education and the American Educational Research Association.
Her research interests include language policy, bilingual education, standardized testing, and national education policy impacting English learners. Kate has published articles in Bilingual Research Journal, Language Learner, NABE News, Schools in the Middle, Education Digest, and NCBE Issue Briefs. She has chapters in Encyclopedia of Bilingual Education; Encyclopedia of Language and Education; Dialects, Englishes, Creoles, and Education; and Educating English Language Learners: A Guide for Administrators. She is currently writing a book in contract for publication with Multilingual Matters about the impact of U.S. testing policies embedded within No Child Left Behind on English language learners.
Previously, Kate has been an Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education and TESOL at the City College of CUNY, and an educational researcher at the National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education. She was also a teacher of English as a second language in U.S. public schools and overseas.

Marcel den Dikken

Research Associate
Personal Website

Marcel den Dikken is Professor of Linguistics in the Linguistics Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Leiden in 1992. He has held appointments at the University of Groningen (Assistant Professor, 1992-1993), the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (postdoctoral researcher, 1993-1997), UCLA (Visiting Assistant Professor, 1997), and Tilburg University (postdoctoral researcher, 1998), and joined the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center's Linguistics Program in the fall of 1998. His research covers syntax and its interfaces with morphology and semantics, and has addressed a variety of topics in this area, including the syntax of predication, transitivity alternations, nominal constituents, agreement, adpositional phrases, polarity items, coordination, and locality restrictions. He has published three books (Particles: On the Syntax of Verb-Particle, Triadic and Causative Constructions, OUP 1995; The Structure of the Noun Phrase in Rotuman, LINCOM 2003; Relators and Linkers: The Syntax of Predication, Predicate Inversion, and Copulas, MIT Press 2006) and numerous journal articles. He is currently one of the co-PIs of a two-year NSF-funded research project on the comparative morpho-syntax of Appalachian English, in which capacity he is a Research Associate of RISLUS.

Funded Projects: The Comparative Morpho-Syntax of Appalachian English (funded by the National Science Foundation)

Eva Fernández

Research Associate
Personal Website

Eva Fernández, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the department of Linguistics and Communication Disorders at Queens College, and in the Program in Linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her primary research interest lies in the way human language is produced and perceived. Her work examines language processing in speakers of different languages and speakers with different language histories. Some of her recent work addresses how phonological information (prosody in particular) is incorporated into a syntactic parse. This research has led to an investigation of the sentence-level prosody produced by English and Spanish monolingual and bilingual speakers.

Mira Goral

Research Associate

Mira Goral is an Associate Professor at the Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, Lehman College, The City University of New York. She received her B.A. from Tel Aviv University and her doctoral degree from the program in Speech and Hearing Sciences at the Graduate School and University Center, CUNY. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Department of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine and the Language in the Aging Brain Laboratory at the Harold Goodglass Aphasia Research Center at the Boston VA Healthcare System. Her research interests include neurolinguistics of bilingualism, aphasia, first language attrition, and language and cognition in older age.

Thomas Ihde

Research Associate
Personal Website

Thomas Ihde is associate professor of Foreign Language Education and chair of the Department of Middle & High School Education at Lehman College. His interests focus on the acquisition of less commonly taught languages and his research projects have collected data from both adults acquiring second languages and infants being raised bilingually. Although a fluent speaker of English, French, Haitian Creole, Irish Gaelic, and Spanish, he has also carried out research and published findings on students learning other languages such as Mandarin.
As director of the CUNY Institute for Irish-American Studies, he founded the Center for Irish Language Acquisition Research. He is collaborating with CUNY colleagues at other campuses on a number of projects that have lead to grant-funded developments including new courses that will lead to a minor and graduate certificate in Irish Language Studies, a Routledge/Taylor & Francis book with CDs and audiotapes documenting and preserving a local dialect of the Irish language, and a website with monthly updates for parents raising their children bilingually in Irish and English. The largest of these projects is the curriculum development one. Thomas Ihde serves as the PI of this Irish Government funded grant which will last three years.
Professor Ihde's lecturing focuses on research findings and best practices in second language teaching and heritage language teaching with adolescents. He has lectured in the M.Ed. TESOL program at Lehman College as well as supervised master's level thesis students. He currently teaches middle and high school pedagogical courses in the M.A. Spanish program as well as undergraduate level courses in the Irish language through the Department of Languages and Literatures at Lehman College.
Thomas Ihde holds a master's degree and Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Dublin (Trinity College).

Elaine Klein

Research Associate

Tatyana Kleyn

Research Associate
Personal Website

Tatyana Kleyn is an assistant professor at the City College of New York in the Bilingual Education and TESOL program. In 2007 she received an Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University in International Educational Development, with a specialization in Bilingual/Bicultural Education. Her dissertation focuses on the intersections of bilingual and multicultural education in Spanish, Haitian Creole, Chinese and Russian bilingual classrooms.
Currently, she is involved in a RISLUS study with RISLUS Fellow Kate Menken that focuses on Long-Term English Language Learners in high schools. She is also interested in the ways teachers address race, ethnicity and sexuality in classroom interactions as well as the cultural, linguistic and educational needs of Garífuna in Honduras and the U.S. She is a co-author of “Teaching in Two Languages: A K-12 practitioners' guide for bilingual educators” with Sharon Adelman Reyes, soon to be published by Corwin Press. Tatyana has worked in the past as an elementary school teacher in San Pedro Sula, Honduras and Atlanta, Georgia.

Miki Makihara

Research Associate

Michael Newman

Research Associate

Michael Newman graduated with a doctorate in applied linguistics from teachers college. He has published one book each in the area of academic literacy and ESL and a number of articles on both these areas. He is currently Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Queens College. His research interests are currently focused on vernacular literacy and variationist sociolinguistics.

Funded projects:
- Personal Experiences With Literacy Of Bilingual Para-educators and Their Impact On Teaching and Learning

Loraine K. Obler

Research Associate
Personal website

Loraine K. Obler is a Distinguished Professor in Speech and Hearing Sciences as well as Linguistics. Her research interests extend from the neurolinguistics of bilingualism to dyslexia and its ramifications for L2 acquisition and from cross-linguistic study of aphasia to the language changes associated with healthy aging and Alzheimer's dementia. Among her books are Language and the Brain, with Kris Gjerlow, and The Bilingual Brain Neuropsychological and Neurolinguistic Aspects of Bilingualism, with Martin Albert.

Maria Victoria Rodriguez

Research Associate

M. Victoria Rodríguez is an assistant professor in the department of Early Childhood and Childhood Education at Lehman College, the City University of New York. She received her bachelor's degree in special education from the University of Barcelona (Spain), her master's degree in bilingual elementary education from City College, The City University of New York and her doctoral degree in education, with a specialization in early childhood special education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She has worked for 20 years as a preschool, elementary and special education teacher in urban settings in two cities Madrid and Barcelona (Spain) and in New York City. As a college instructor, she has taught in teacher preparation programs at City College, the City University of New York, Teachers College, Columbia University and "La Universidad a Distancia" in Madrid. Dr. Rodríguez's areas of interest include language socialization experiences of culturally and linguistically diverse students, emergent literacy among linguistically diverse students with and without disabilities, and the role of schools of education in the preparation of teachers in urban settings.

Funded Projects:
- Personal Experiences With Literacy Of Bilingual Para-educators and Their Impact On Teaching and Learning

Ana Ortigosa

Visiting Scholar

Ana Ortigosa holds a PhD in English Linguistics from the University of La Rioja (Spain), where she was working as a teaching assistant for two years. She has been a visiting scholar in the University of California (Berkeley), University of Amsterdam, University of Sydney and University of Sao Paulo. She is the author of several research papers and has participated in numerous international conferences. Her research interests focus on functional linguistics and languages in contact, more specifically the Spanish of the United States.

Angela Reyes

Research Associate
Personal website

Angela Reyes is an assistant professor of linguistics in the English department at Hunter College, CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Her primary research areas are sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and Asian American Studies. Her work has focused on indexicality, metapragmatics, ethnic dialects, language crossing, mock varieties, slang, and style, particularly in relation to Asian American communities. She is currently carrying out a sociolinguistic study of Asian American cram schools in New York City. Her book, Language, Identity, and Stereotype Among Southeast Asian American Youth: The Other Asian (2007, Lawrence Erlbaum), is an ethnographic and discourse analytic study of how Southeast Asian refugee youth formed their identities in relation to stereotypes. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow (2006-2007) and Ford Fellow (2002-2003), and her work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, and Discourse Studies.

Gabriela Pérez Báez

Visiting Scholar

Gabriela Pérez Báez is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University at Buffalo, a Visiting Research Scholar in the Linguistics Department at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and a Researcher with the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica. Her research interests center around maintenance, documentation and analysis of indigenous languages of Mesoamerica with a focus on Zapotec languages spoken in the state of Oaxaca of her native Mexico. She has devoted several conference presentations and her Master’s project to reporting on language attitudes and endangerment in the speech community of San Lucas Quiaviní (SLQ) Zapotec. This variety of Central Zapotec is spoken by some 2,000 people settled in the Valley of Tlacolula, Oaxaca, and also by a large migrant group in the Los Angeles, California area since the late 1960s. Gabriela’s current dissertation research focuses on the sociolinguistic profile of the community of SLQ Zapotec speakers in California and on the impact of migration on the survival prospects of the language in both the Mexican and the US communities.

In her role as Researcher with the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica, under the supervision of Dr. Terrence Kaufman, Gabriela is responsible for elicitation and development of a lexical database of Juchiteco, a Central Zapotec variety spoken in the area of Juchitán, Oaxaca. She is expected to complete elicitation and verification of the Juchiteco database in the Summer of 2007. In addition to her work documenting Juchiteco, Gabriela is engaged in the description of the semantics of spatial language in this variety of Zapotec, with a focus on the properties of body part terms used in locative description.

In Mexico, Gabriela is the Representative of the Language Revitalization Commission to the International Advisory Committee created by the Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas for the preservation of endangered indigenous languages in Mexico. At the University at Buffalo, she has been an Arthur A. Schomburg Fellow, and Chair of the Conference Committee of the Niagara Linguistic Society.

Christian Muench

Visiting Scholar

Christian Muench holds a Ph.D. in Romance Philology from the University of Munich. His dissertation was on the development of literacy in Catalonia as a result of language policy. He has studied Spanish, French, English and Catalan philology and has teacher degrees in Spanish, French and English. He has a Master in Basque Studies (U.N.E.D., Spain), has had scholarships from the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government), Institut d’Estudis Catalans (Catalan Academy) and Eusko Ikaskuntza (Society for Basque Studies), and has recently been a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Multiple Languages and Literacies at Teachers College, Columbia University. He has been Assistant Professor at the University of Frankfurt since the year 2000 and is currently Visiting Scholar for the academic year at the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS), at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His current research draws on the relationship between language and identity in Latino communities in New York City, focussing on religious communities in different churches in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Leigh Garrison

Assistant to the Directors