Lisa Sullivan

PhD Candidate, Linguistics

Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto
Email: lisa.sullivan@mail.utoronto.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 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.

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 (2020-2022) at the University of Toronto. Including:

  • Introduction to WIT: Teaching and Grading Writing – This workshop is 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.
  • Providing Effective Feedback – This workshop is a continuation of the Introduction to WIT workshop and focuses on providing effective feedback to non-majors. It provides TAs with the opportunity to share and discuss strategies for providing students with more effective feedback more efficiently. TAs also evaluate different comments on the same sample writing assignment to glean ideas about how they can improve their own feedback.
  • 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 2020 with Lex Konnelly, Virgilio Partida Peñalva, Nathan Sanders, Pocholo Umbal and Erin Vearncombe.

This workshop will help us start a discussion about how we 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 will look 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, will discuss examples of affirming and non-affirming writing about the community, and why this writing is or is not affirming. We will also have time for discussion in the second half of the workshop.