Sociolinguist Kathryn Campbell-Kibler really cares about teaching at Ohio State -- so much that she’s made it part of her research. Campbell-Kibler is a distinguished teacher; she has won two major teaching awards in the last two years -- the Rodica C. Botoman award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring, and the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award.
“I like teaching at Ohio State because teaching is fun and Ohio State students are, as a whole, sensible and interesting people,” she said. “I have had a ton of really engaged dedicated students and it's been great to watch them develop and go onto great things. I especially care about supporting students of color, who don't always get needed support at predominantly white institutions like Ohio State.”
She has used the money from her teaching awards (plus two additional grants from the College of Arts and Sciences) to fund her ongoing project, See Your Speech. See Your Speech is an innovative program that aims to integrate research and teaching by creating teaching modules that also generate data for use by researchers. Students are invited to create data by recording their voices. They then learn interesting linguistic things from simple analyses of those recordings. Students are also offered the chance, but not required, to allow their data to be included in a growing corpus of speech to be made more broadly available to researchers.
See Your Speech has recently switched to using an interactive website (developed by Chris Worth, PhD ’16) that allows students to view and download visual representations of their speech. You can see examples of the kinds of modules and feedback that students get here:
https://research.ling.ohio-state.edu/seeyourspeech/public/fdbk/index.php
Campbell-Kibler has also worked with several undergraduates on the project, on everything from helping to craft the original structure of the project to programming to analyzing data.
In addition to See Your Speech, Campbell-Kibler also works with the Buckeye Language Network on the NSF-funded REU site “The Science of Language and the Language of Science”. This provides 10-week paid summer internships for students from institutions with limited access to research to learn about and conduct research at the Language Sciences Research Lab at COSI. http://bln.osu.edu/REU_Main.htm
