English Professors Harim Kwon and Heidi Lawrence Selected as Winners of Two Provost’s Summer Team Impact Projects

English Professors Harim Kwon and Heidi Lawrence Selected as Winners of Two Provost’s Summer Team Impact Projects
English Professors Harim Kwon (Linguistics) and Heidi Lawrence (Writing and Rhetoric) have been selected as 2020 winners of the Provost’s Summer Team Impact Projects. These faculty-led projects highlight innovative curricular ideas that enhance cross-unit, multidisciplinary undergraduate and graduate curriculum development activities, or are tied directly to a Mason Impact signature program: research and creative activities, civic engagement, global education, or entrepreneurship.
 
Professor Kwon's project (in collaboration with Vincent Chanethom in Modern and Classical Languages), "Building an Acoustic and Articulatory Corpus of French as an Additional Language,” aims to build a corpus of spoken French by adult learners of French. They will work closely with student researchers who will collect speech data, including both articulatory and acoustic recordings, and analyze interesting phonetic phenomena from the collected data. In addition to the practical techniques, the student researchers will also receive theoretical training in linguistics. The collaborated speech data will be made available online, which will be a valuable resource for researchers in the field of phonetics and second language learning as well as for language teachers.
 
Professor Lawrence has collaborated with Karen Livingston (Office of Entrepreneurship and innovation) on The Mason Student-Run Venture (SRV) Project, which gives students the opportunity to create, manage, operate, and work for business ventures that are run by students yet supported within the university. Working for an SRV gives students a unique opportunity for experiential learning and a testing ground for understanding business operations before setting out on their own. Students who work with SRVs gain opportunities for distinct experiential learning, including multidisciplinary problem-solving, research, stakeholder outreach and assessment, teamwork, and leadership. The Mason SRV Project will research SRVs to determine best practices and models; conduct market research to determine the viability of a pilot venture; and use the knowledge gained develop a plan to create SRVs at Mason.
 
Both of these exciting projects will be recruiting Mason student researchers to join them in their work this summer. Stay tuned for more information in upcoming newsletters, and keep an eye on the department's student listservs.
 
To read about all of the 2020 winning projects, click here.