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For further information, please contact the FASS Coordinator, Recruitment, Community Outreach and Engagement at fass_rec@sfu.ca.

FASS in the Class: The Off-Campus Visit

High school counselors and teachers — Bring SFU and FASS to your classroom with our guest speaker opportunities! 

We have a roster of highly successful FASS graduate students who are keen to share their research and career journeys with your students. Each speaker will bring a unique perspective to their presentation and will add value to the learning experience by sharing their knowledge and expertise in a humanities and social sciences subject. 

Presentations are subject to change and limited to availability.

Why are You Using that Tone on Me? Understanding and Deciphering the Use of Pitch as a Feature in Languages

Ideal for: English, English First Peoples, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Comparative Cultures, and Career Education

This talk focuses on pitch - a particular feature studied in linguistics that is used in many languages. However, the ways pitch is used varies among them. I will be using examples in multiple languages to look into multiple linguistic phenomena and their implications inside and outside of linguistics through the lens of my own research and my language teaching experiences.

This talk takes a bottom-up approach and will be initially centred around the field of phonetics, but expands outward to other types of study such as sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and language acquisition/learning as the talk progresses. This talk will be formatted in a workshop-like format to allow for more interaction and self-motivated problem solving activities.

Speaker

Ivan Fong (pronouns: any) is an MA student in the Department of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University. Being an avid language learner and having been brought up in a language diverse background, Ivan studies the field of linguistics with a more holistic approach by incorporating theoretical and applied linguistics theories in his own research. Their immediate focus is on the phenomenon known as tone merging in Cantonese and its current emerging patterns within both native and heritage speakers. Ivan hopes to further investigate into other language changes such as tonogenesis in modern Korean.