“Françoise Mougeon has made a signal contribution to Glendon through her two tenures as associate principal academic & research,” said Glendon Principal Kenneth McRoberts. “Over these several years, Françoise could always be counted on to discharge her responsibilities with a clear sense of purpose, with a concern with rigour and fairness, and with close attention to detail. Through it all, she managed to maintain an active research program, to which she soon can give her full attention with a well-deserved sabbatical.”

Right: Françoise Mougeon

Mougeon is completing her second term as associate principal academic & research, having also served from 2003 to 2004. She will be on sabbatical starting July 1, and will return to teaching in 2012.

Mougeon’s research focused on the progress of students in their second language with funding through a Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada grant, from 2005 to 2008, and it continues still, in collaboration with a professor at the University of Toronto.

“My hope is to establish a French-as-a-second-language institute at Glendon, enlarging our research to studying students who are not specializing in languages,” said Mougeon, an active member of Glendon’s . “I have always tried to project linguistics and language studies as more than a support subject, but rather an important academic subject on its own.”

Other future projects on her agenda include establishing a centre for advanced studies on francophonies, which she considers a natural development for Glendon, given that relating projects are already in progress and there are a significant number of fellow faculty members on campus – a core group – who are interested in participating.

She has several ongoing projects to hand over with the position. These include an innovative program for francophone students choosing public relations as their future profession. The four-year program, still to be approved, would provide graduates with a Glendon BA and a Cité Collégiale diploma, completed at the same time.

Submitted by Glendon communications officer Marika Kemeny

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Funded through the  program of the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the principal investigator of the project – Le français à la mesure d'un continent : un patrimoine en partage (French Language Across a Continent: A Shared Heritage) – is Professor France Martineau of the University of Ottawa who holds a University Research Chair in Language and Migration in French America and is the director of Le laboratoire Les Polyphonies du français and co-founder of the Laboratoire de français ancien.

The study will include 13 fellow researchers and 59 partners from Canada, the United States, France and Japan working in a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, history, geography and computer science.

Right: Raymond Mougeon

Other members of the involved in the project include Hélène Blondeau of the University of Florida, Annette Boudreau and Rodrigue Landry of the Université de Moncton, Yves Frenette of the University of Ottawa, Françoise Gadet of the Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (Paris X) and Ruth King of 91��ɫ.

The way French is spoken in places as diverse as Gatineau, Shediac and New Orleans can tell a lot about how Francophone communities evolved in North America. "We are looking at three fields of expansion from France: New France – now known as Quebec – Louisiana and Acadia," says Mougeon.

"If we just focused on Canada, we would miss some important components of the North American francophonie, mainly Louisiana, probably one of the most interesting colonial settings, because it involved not only colonization from France, but also secondary migration from Acadia – basically the French language continued to live, but in a completely different setting from the original."

According to Mougeon, the project team plans to reach beyond linguistics to include history and sociology. "We believe that you can only understand the evolution of language if you can actually place it in its broader socio-historical setting.”

The study will use innovative approaches, by presenting individuals and their language as a central factor in the changes that society undergoes and by examining the relationship between the cognitive and cultural aspects of language. Relying on extensive documentation, the study will seek to identify the concerns of present-day francophone communities, in majority, minority or multicultural settings.

The research will also help produce a major corpus of French in North America, which will include informal exchanges between individuals in the form of private correspondence or spontaneous conversation. This publicly accessible tool will be useful as a starting point to systematically compare francophone communities.

Mougeon has conducted research on the diversity of spoken French in Ontario, the demo-linguistic vitality of the Franco-Ontarian community, the sociolinguistic history of French in Quebec and France from the colonial period to the present day and the sociolinguistic competence of French-immersion students. He is the author or co-author of several publications and has participated in 36 research projects with funds representing over $5 million in research grants, including those from SSHRC, the Ontario Ministry of Education and the Association of Canadian Studies.

By Marika Kemeny, Glendon communications officer.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The $2.5-million project is led by Francine Martineau of the university's French department, but includes 13 fellow researchers and 59 "partners" from Canada, the United States, France and Japan.

The seven-year plan is to study 400 years of family histories to examine how language has shaped communities and cultures.

"We are looking at three fields of expansion from France that are all basically located across the St. Lawrence, which is New France, Louisiana and Acadia," explained co-investigator of 91��ɫ [Glendon and the ].

"If we just focused on Canada, then we would miss some important components of North American francophonie, mainly Louisiana – and probably one of the most interesting colonial settings as well, because it involved not only colonization from France, but also secondary migration from Acadia – basically the French language continued to live, but in a completely different setting from the original."

According to Mougeon, the project team plans to reach beyond linguistics and also focus on history and sociology. The team includes experts in linguistics, anthropology, history, geography and computer science. "We believe that you can only understand the evolution of language if you can actually place it in its broader socio-historical setting," said Mougeon.

. . .

The research team received the grant from the Major Collaborative Research Initiatives Program of the (SSHRC).

The project’s focus includes four centuries of history of French on the North American continent in three main colonial settings: Louisiana, New France, which is now Quebec, and Acadia.

Mougeon was also interviewed by the (video clip attached) and spoke about the study with CBC Radio Moncton, NB, March 17.

You can also read the project's .

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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In her essay (Sept. 12), Jennifer Schuessler concocts a peculiar mash-up. The pairing of a fictional account of bonobos (Sara Gruen’s ) with a nonfiction book on apes (Jon Cohen’s “Almost Chimpanzee”) makes some sense; Gruen grounded her novel in visits to real-life bonobos at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, a place also visited by Cohen.

But lest readers be led astray, we wish to clarify that the Great Ape Trust is in no way connected with Marc Hauser, the Harvard scientist mentioned in the essay who has been accused of falsifying data in his primate studies. For those with serious interest about the research into the language abilities of bonobos, extensive video documentation is freely available on the Internet, including material at .

We are scientists who have worked closely with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues at the , and/or have observed and interacted with the bonobos. We teach and write about the work impugned in the Book Review — because we respect its scientific integrity, because it has powerfully transformed our understanding of what apes are capable of, and because, through it, we grasp more fully what it means to share our world with other sentient creatures.

Benson and Greaves, members of Glendon’s , traveled to the United States to meet with earlier this year.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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The team is engaged in the multi-location, multi-year (BHD) research project, ongoing since the summer of 2009 in Glendon’s (CRLC) and funded by (RAY). Greaves and Benson are the principal investigators for the project, which is striving to produce a searchable database of video clips of -human conversations to document the language capacities of the bonobos, a type of ape, and to extend scientific understanding of how language has evolved.

For the 2009-2010 academic year, the team included five student participants, some paid and some volunteers – second-year undergraduates Charlotte Petrie, Maria Wong, Laura Guecha and Meng Yang, as well as fourth-year undergraduate Lidia Giosa, who has been accepted into a PhD program for speech pathology at the University of Louisiana partly as a result of her participation in the BHD project. Two additional participants are recent Glendon graduate Daniel Byrnes (BA Hons. '09), who has continued to work on the project since graduating, and mature student Bruce Anderson.

Left: Senior scholars Jim Benson and Bill Greaves with the Bonobo Human Discourse research team members

The current project has emerged from past cooperation among a number of scholars from different countries, including , a scientist with special standing at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, linguistics and media communication Professor Paul Thibault of University of Agder in Norway and Meena Debashish, phonetics & spoken English professor at the English & Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, India, along with Benson and Greaves. This international team had worked together in 2005 on a project based at Glendon and funded by the and has been actively collaborating ever since.

For this project, Savage-Rumbaugh has made available 400 hours of video footage filmed by the  (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) representing a corpus of spontaneous interaction between researchers at Geogia State University and the bonobos. In the videos, the humans use spoken language to communicate and the bonobos use a lexigram keyboard of 450 symbols that produces spoken English words.

Right: A bonobo

Benson explained that this project provides many types of learning opportunities for participating students. “The international dimension of the students’ training has been present from the beginning. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh is based in Des Moines, Iowa, and the data she has made available to us was assembled in Georgia. At the same time that we were initiating these undergraduates into the linguistic analysis of bonobo-human discourse, Dr. Rumbaugh was engaging students from Buena Vista University, Simpson College and Missouri State University in work that was based on the bonobos. The US students were looking at the bonobos in terms of psychology and anthropology, rather than linguistics, and it became very clear that much was to be gained by bringing these young people together.”

For this international collaboration, Benson and Greaves have incorporated US professors involved at different institutions (Savage-Rumbaugh, psychology Professors Carl Halgren and Don Evans of Simpson College in Iowa, anthropology Professor Margie Buckner of Missouri State University, and psychology and computer science Professor Kenneth Schweller of Buena Vista University in Iowa) as “teachers” in the Glendon Moodle Bonobo Human Discourse Web site. Their students will also be included shortly on the Web site.

“But interaction on a Web site has its limitations,” said Greaves. “The best possible way to launch this joint venture is through a face-to-face collaboration. Bringing the 91��ɫ team to meet with the others at Simpson College in Des Moines over the weekend of April 29 will provide an excellent opportunity for personal interaction.”

Greaves said this research experience provides students with a multi-dimensional experience, including practical career training and international networking opportunities. “Our long-term strategy is to give a group of undergraduates an exceptional apprenticeship in research extending over three years and, at the same time, to build for them – and for us – a base of scholarly interaction that binds student researchers in the US with our student researchers in Canada.”

Submitted by Marika Kemeny, Glendon communications officer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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