Lisa Sullivan

SSHRC Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Linguistics

Department of Linguistics and Language Studies
Carleton University
Email: lisasullivan@cunet.carleton.ca

Workshops

I have developed and facilitated coding workshops on data manipulation in R and running online experiments in jsPsych. I have also developed and/or facilitated workshops on writing, and teaching and grading writing.

Coding Workshops

Phonetic Data Manipulation in R

Developed and ran a 4 hour workshop for Yoonjung Kang’s 2019 Jackman Scholars in Residence. The goal of the workshop was to teach the students to use R to code names for several phonetic factors and generate descriptive statistics and graphs. The workshop had 4 parts

  1. Importing, viewing and saving data (including preparing data to import into R)
  2. Data manipulation (including extracting segments from a string, counting the number of occurrences of a substring in a a string, and coding a variable based on the content of a string)
  3. Basic descriptive statistics (including counts, proportions, mean, median, standard deviation, minimum, maximum, range)
  4. Visualization with ggplot (including bar charts, boxplots and density plots)

Download R code and sample data set: [Data Files]

Introduction to Online Experiments in jsPsych

Developed and ran a 4 hour workshop (two 2 hour sessions) for graduate students in the University of Toronto’s Department of Linguistics and Avery Ozburn’s undergraduate RAs in summer of 2021. The goal of the workshop was to introduce participants to developing online experiments in jsPsych and walk them through setting up an experiment with an ABX task, consent form and background questionnaire using jsPsych. It also included a brief introduction to web design/development. More information and materials are available on the workshop website.

Statistics Workshops

Introduction to Linguistic Data Manipulation and Visualization in R

Developed and ran a workshop consisting of five 2-hour sessions for faculty, graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Manitoba. This workshop introduced participants to R, tidyverse, string manipulation, arithmetic operations, linguistic data coding and visualizing data in ggplot. General concepts related to programming, data manipulation and data visualization were introduced alongside hands-on practice with R.

Introduction to Regression Modelling for Linguistics

Developed and ran a workshop consisting of six 2 hour sessions for faculty, graduate students and undergraduate RAs in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Manitoba. This workshop explored linear and logistic regression modelling including, simple, multivariate and mixed effects models and dealing with continuous and categorical variables. We discussed how to build and run regression models and how to interpret the results, as well as how to write up the statistical analysis and results.

Introduction to Regression for Linguistics (Short)

Developed and delivered a 1 hour workshop for faculty and graduate students in linguistics and applied linguistics at Oklahoma State University. Topics covered included: how and why regression is used in linguistics and applied linguistics, the kinds of regression used, and how to understand write-ups and analyses. The purpose of this workshop was not to teach regression, but rather to help prepare students to read papers with regression analyses.

Teaching & Writing Workshops

Writing Workshop: Paraphrasing & Using Linguistic Examples

I ran a workshop for LIN 306 as part of my LWTA (Lead Writing TA) position (2020-2022) focused on tips for paraphrasing and how to use linguistic examples in writing. It also introduced students to the writing process and gave them tips on reading papers and taking notes to help identify the most relevant information in their sources.

TA Training Workshops

I have run a series of workshops to train TAs on teaching and grading writing as part of my LWTA position (2020-2023) at the University of Toronto. Including:

  • Introduction to WIT: Teaching and Grading Writing (University of Toronto) – This workshop was intended for TAs new to the WIT (Writing-Integrated Teaching) program. It introduces them to WIT and basic principles of teaching and grading writing, focusing on four components of effective feedback.
  • Introduction to Teaching and Grading Writing – A more generalized version of Introduction to WIT which teaches TAs basic principles for teaching and grading writing with a focus on providing effective feedback. University of Toronto-specific elements have been removed and replaced with other content and activities.
  • Providing Effective Feedback – This workshop gives TAs the opportunity to share and discuss strategies for providing students with more effective feedback more efficiently. TAs also have the opportunity to learn from each other in a feedback-on-feedback session where they bring in some comments they left on student work and provide each other with feedback to improve them.
  • Developing Low Stakes Writing Activities for Tutorials – This workshop focuses on developing low stakes writing activities for tutorials or small class sizes. TAs develop activities for the courses they are TAing which target areas students struggle with or specific concepts that are being targeted in higher-stakes writing. They also have an opportunity to discuss how they teach writing.

Affirming Writing: Teaching Writing about Communities in Affirming Ways

I planned and facilitated this workshop in Winter 2021 in collaboration with Lex Konnelly, Virgilio Partida Peñalva, Nathan Sanders, Pocholo Umbal and Erin Vearncombe.

This workshop was intended to start a discussion about how course instructors and TAs can teach students to write about communities in affirming ways, especially when they are not members of those communities. The goals of the workshop are (1) to help the participants understand what affirming writing is and the complexities associated with it and (2) to equip participants with tools to help teach their students about affirming writing. In the workshop, we looked at 4 case studies: Indigenous communities, immigrant communities, transgender communities and Deaf communities. For each case, someone who works with these communities, and in some cases is a member of these communities, discussed examples of affirming and non-affirming writing about the community, and why this writing is or is not affirming. After the workshop, the panellists created short handouts from their talks which are available on the LEDIR Affirming Writing webpage.

AI-Generated Text and Teaching in Linguistics

I organized and was a panellist for this workshop in Winter 2023 in collaboration with Don Boyes, Alexandra Gustafson, William Ju, Nathan Sanders, Boris Steipe, David Suarez and David Zweig.

This workshop was a panel discussion covering topics such as how OpenAI/ChatCPT works, what it can and can’t do, how to use it effectively, how it is currently being used, likely future developments, how to address them pedagogically, and concerns arising from this technology, as well as linguistics-specific examples of how assignments can be developed with this technology in mind. I presented on an infographic assignment I creased for my LING 1010 (Language in Context) course that ChatGPT was unable to complete.