Linguistics 10, "History and Structure of
English Words"
Spring 2002
Linguistics 10, "History and Structure of English Words"
Spring 2003
Honors 98, Seminar 25, "Science of the Singing
Voice"
-- taught by Dr. Patricia Keating, while I stood by with vocal examples
Teaching philosophy
Learning anything is fun.
Learning is something that students do; it isn't done to them. Students who are aware of their role as self-teachers are able to fashion their own learning experience.
A teacher should convey not only the course content, but also why the subject is relevant and interesting.
A course should be sufficiently challenging to give a sense of accomplishment, but presented in small enough increments to be mastered with a reasonable amount of diligence.
I am completely fascinated by the variety of sounds used in languages. I like nothing better than to putter around the phonetics lab, analyzing sounds from languages that are remote from my own, and figuring out how people make and perceive them. Other passions are morphology, historical and comparative linguistics, language change, and writing systems.
Publications
Vowel Perception in a Second Language. In Phonology, Morphology, and
the Empirical Imperative: Papers in Honour of Bruce L. Derwing, edited by
Grace E. Wiebe, Gary Libben, Tom Priestly, Ron Smyth, and H. Samuel Wang. Taipei,
Taiwan: The Crane Publishing Company, 2006.
A New Tool for
Accessing Authentic Materials. Joint paper with Ariann Stern. In Content,
tasks and projects in the language classroom. Proceedings
from a May 2004 conference at the Monterey Institute of International
Studies, Graduate School of Language and Educational Linguistics.
Phonetic
Structures in Jalapa Mazatec. Joint article with Daniel Silverman, Paul
Kirk, and Peter Ladefoged. Anthropological Linguistics 37:1, Spring
1995
Phonetic Structures of Khonoma Angami. Joint article with Peter Ladefoged,
Peri Bhaskararao, and Nichemeno Chase. Linguistics
of the Tibeto-Burman Area
16:2, Fall 1993
Co-Principal Investigator, with Peter Ladefoged, of the project
"Broadening Access to UCLA Phonetics Data," sponsored by the
National Science Foundation. The goal of the project is to digitize the UCLA
phonetics lab's collection of phonetic fieldwork recordings and make them
available for scholarly research on a website, The
UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive. The materials, collected over a period of 50
years, are from all regions of the world. A number of them preserve
languages that are endangered or no longer spoken.
Authentic Materials coordinator for the UCLA Language Materials Project , which provides
online citations to resources for teachers of less-commonly taught languages. "Authentic Materials" are materials that were originally intended for native speakers but can be used fruitfully in second-language learning.
Linguist at Language Weaver , creator of statistics-based machine translation systems.
Designed an online
lesson for Korean teachers, based on authentic materials. After you link
to the topic menu, select Shopping: Fish Market. (If you don't see Korean
letters on the web page, you need to download the latest version of your browser,
then go to the browser's View: Encoding menu and change the character set
to Unicode or Korean.)
Deep in the past, I worked as a programmer and systems analyst at System Development Corporation, an early think tank where they thought up ways that computers might be useful to civilians. (Times have changed.) Since I was in the library applications department, I ended up as an expert on library systems. Later I designed data management applications for corporate libraries, records managers, and publishers, including SilverPlatter Information and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. I have worked as a technical writer, indexer, and corporate trainer, and managed bilingual acquisitions for the library of a local elementary school. I still enjoy occasional consulting on databases and web design.
Grew up in San Diego, California
B.A. from Pomona College (music: pipe organ)
M.A. and Ph.D. from UCLA (linguistics: phonetics)
Lived 5 years in Germany, one summer in France
Currently reside in Los Angeles
Married 37 years to the late Donald Blankenship (B.A. from Cal Tech (physics); M.A. and Ph.D. from UC San Diego (Psychophysics); and co-inventor of the digital bibliographic system that became Medline at the National Library of Medicine)
Two fabulous children -- still living with me, along with a troop of pets
Love to travel, hike, rollerblade, make music, cook, create with yarn, thread, textiles, metal
Other fields I would get involved in if I had nine lives: geology, oceanography,
playing chamber music
Opera Singer
