An Interview with APPLE Lecture Speaker Professor Brian MacWhinney

Abstract

On April 22, 2016, the TESOL/AL Web Journal (represented by Farah S. Akbar, Cheng-Ling Alice Chen, Sarah Sok, and Yuna Seong) had the opportunity to sit down with Professor Brian MacWhinney, guest speaker for the 2016 Applied Linguistics & Language Education (APPLE) Lecture Series, hosted annually by the TESOL/Applied Linguistics Programs at Teachers College, Columbia University. Professor MacWhinney spoke about his research and advice he has for current and future researchers in the TESOL and Applied Linguistics fields. Professor Brian MacWhinney is a Professor of Psychology, Computational Linguistics, and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in psycholinguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. With Elizabeth Bates, he developed the Competition Model of first and second language processing and acquisition. He has also co-founded the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) corpus for the study of first language acquisition with Catherine Snow. His recent work includes studies of online learning in second language vocabulary and grammar, situationally embedded second language learning, neural network modeling of lexical development, fMRI studies of children with focal brain lesions, and ERP studies of between-language competition. We thank Professor MacWhinney for the great opportunity to learn more about his work and research. We also thank Fred Tsutagawa for videotaping and Dr. Hoa Nguyen for coordinating the APPLE Lecture Series Interview.

Keywords

• Applied linguistics
• Applied Linguistics & Language Education Lecture Series
• Computational Linguistics
• First language acquisition
• Second language acquisition
• Child Language Data Exchange System
• CHILDES