User:Rkasak

Background
Originally from a suburb of Chicago. I hold a B.A. from the University of Iowa in Spanish, Russian, and Secondary Foreign Language Education. I spent the better part of a decade teaching in Title I schools in Chicago and its near western suburbs. In that time, I taught Spanish, Russian, English as a Second Language, and Social Studies at the high school level. While still teaching, I completed the M.A. program in Linguistics from Northeastern Illinois University.

I am currently a graduate student at Yale University, where I am pursuing a Ph.D. in Linguistics. I am active in language revitalization efforts on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota and the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, where I do work on Mandan, Hidatsa, and Crow through the Language Conservancy, a non-profit that is dedicated to assisting in the creation of pedagogical materials for under-documented languages of North America. My most current project involves the creation of textbooks for Mandan, as well as an online dictionary and vocabulary builder. I assist with similar efforts in Hidatsa and Crow.

My ancestors all emigrated to Chicago around the beginning of the 20th century. Their countries of origin were the Irish Free State, Kingdom of Italy, Imperial Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My family from Austria-Hungary spoke Slovak, and my family from the Russian Empire spoke a variety of Russian that was strongly influenced by Ukrainian, or a variety of Ukrainian that was strongly influenced Russian. The jury is still out on that one.

Linguistics

 * Historical Linguistics: The study of language change over long periods of time.
 * Linguistic Anthropology: The study of how language influences social life.
 * Language Documentation: The process of gathering information about a language to build a record of the linguistic characteristics of a group.
 * Morphology: The study of the smallest grammatical units in a language, which can be a word or just the components of a word.
 * Phonology: The study of the sound system of a language and the interaction between the sounds of a language.
 * Syntax: The study of the process in which utterances are created.

Pedagogy

 * ESL: Theory and methodology related to the instruction of English to learners whose native language is not English.
 * Heritage Language Learning: Theory and methodology pertaining to the instruction of languages to which a learner may have been exposed to in their home or community, but is not necessarily their dominant language.
 * Second Language Education: Theory and methodology related to the instruction of languages that are not native to child or adult learners.