Faculty | Linguistics | SIU

Education: Ph.D., Indiana University
Interests: Phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics, dialectology, Central Asian languages, language acquisition

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Katherine I. Martin is an associate professor in Linguistics at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and head of the APPLES (Applied Psycholinguistics in Literacy, Education, & Second Language) Lab, part of the Saluki Linguistics Laboratory Consortium. Originally from Michigan, she earned an AB in Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science from the University of Michigan and an MA and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh. She has been at Southern Illinois University Carbondale since 2015. 

Dr. Martin works primarily in the fields of TESOL and second language acquisition. Her research focuses on second language literacy development, particularly the influence of writing system on word recognition and spelling; vocabulary learning; and the influence of individual differences such as working memory, phonological awareness, and foreign language anxiety. She is also interested in the complexities of coding second language data (e.g., in spoken data, how do we distinguish an accent versus an incorrect response? In written data, how can we distinguish spelling versus grammatical errors?) and extending the use of research instruments originally developed for monolingual populations to multilingual individuals. 

Her current projects include a detailed examination of spelling skills in users of English as a second language and examining the time-course of word recognition and sentence reading using priming and eye-tracking methods. She also has active projects with students and former students looking at teachers’ familiarity with foreign language reading anxiety and comparing the efficacy of various strategies for learning foreign language verbs.  

She teaches courses in multilingual education, language assessment, research methods, introductory linguistics, professional development, and second language reading and vocabulary. When not involved with academic work, she enjoys hiking, traveling, reading, and spending time with her husband and two pugs.

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Shannon McCrocklin is an Associate Professor of TESOL/Applied Linguistics in the School of Languages and Linguistics. She earned her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics and Technology from Iowa State University in 2014 and her M.A. in Teaching English as a Second Language from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Her research focuses on the acquisition of second language phonology, computer-assisted language learning (CALL), and teacher-education in TESOL. Example recent publications include:  

• Sonsaat-Hegelheimer, S. & McCrocklin, S. (2022). Research-informed materials for pronunciation teaching. In J. Levis, T. Derwing, and S. Sonsaat-Hegelheimer (Eds.) Second Language Pronunciation: Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons. 
• Levis, J. & McCrocklin S. (2021). The pragmatic force of second language accent in education. In G. Planchenault and L. Polyak (Eds.) Pragmatics of Accent (pp. 117-140). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins. 
• McCrocklin, S. (2020). Exploring the effectiveness of structured language-learning experiences for bilinguals in a language-acquisition course. TESOL Journal, 11(2), 1-16. 
• McCrocklin, S. (2019). ASR-based dictation practice for second language pronunciation improvement. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, 5(1), 98-118. 

Her full publication record is available on her Google Scholar profile.  

Her courses taught at SIU include: 

• Ling 300 - Intro to Descriptive Linguistics 
• Ling 473/573 - Intro to CALL 
• Ling 485/585 - Teaching L2 Speaking and Listening 
• Ling 583 - TESOL Practicum 
• Ling 590 - Advanced Seminar in L2 Pronunciation 
• Ling 592 - Advanced Seminar in CALL  

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My research is in corpus-assisted discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. I'm especially interested in the usage, change, and political influence of cultural keywords in American media. Following my MA in Applied Linguistics at SIU, I earned my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Georgia. Go Dawgs...both Salukis and Bulldogs!

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My first introduction to linguistics and TESOL came during my Cambridge CELTA and developed over the next several years as I taught EFL abroad. This experience led me to pursue my MA in Applied Linguistics at SIUC and then my PhD in Linguistics at the University of Georgia, where my research focused on how people express themselves socially and emotionally through phonetics (i.e., the way the sounds of language are produced and perceived). My current interests include the role of emotion in language and learning in the second language classroom as well as best practices in TESOL composition and grammar.

I have presented my research at a wide variety of conferences including meetings of the Linguistic Society of America, the American Dialect Society, the Acoustical Society of America, and New Ways of Analyzing Variation. My work on sociophonetic variation has been published in the Journal of English Linguistics, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, and my work on emotion has been published in the journal NeuroImage.

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Dr. Jeffrey Punske is an Associate Professor in Linguistics within the School of Languages and Linguistics. He earned his PhD from the University of Arizona in Linguistics in 2012. He joined SIU in 2014, with previous employment at the University of Oklahoma and Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. His primary expertise is in syntax-morphology interface, particularly Distributed Morphology with secondary expertise in linguistics pedagogy and outreach.

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Education: Ph.D., Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 2005
Interests: Intercultural/International communication, cultural studies, ethnographic methods, and postmodernism.

Education: Ph.D., University of Michigan.
Interests: First and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, syntactic theory, Tamil syntax. 

Education: Ph.D., University of Hawaii.
Interests: Second language acquisition, language testing and assessment, as well as Chinese linguistics and literature.