News | Department of Linguistics

Dr. Eman Saadah, Director of the Arabic Language Program, is featured on Al Jazeera!
2023-11-09 - Dr. Eman Saadah was featured in Al-Jazeera news, speaking about her role on the committee for this year's U.S Arabic Debate competition. In this article, she discusses how debating opportunities can enhance language learning....
UIUC Students Distinguish Themselves at the U.S. Universities Arab Debating Championship
2023-11-09 - Congratulations to the UIUC Arabic Debate Team for their amazing performance at Qatar Debates' US Debate Championship! This team scored Fourth Place at the national level with team members Shireen Aydogan (Senior, Molecular and Cellular Biology and Arabic), Amina Gurmen (Senior, Education and...
Xun Yan to be co-editor of Language Testing Journal
2023-11-03 - Congratulations to Dr. Xun Yan, on becoming co-editor of the journal Language Testing. This journal is the premier international journal in language assessment. It is an international peer reviewed...
Celebrating International Education Week with a Taste of Language
2023-11-02 - International Education Week is an annual event that aims to celebrate global education, cultural exchange, and scholarship as well as to raise awareness about the breadth of international education activities and resources available in our community. This event is sponsored by International...
Check out Silvina Montrul's interview with Illinois Public Media
2023-10-30 - Silvina Montrul was featured in a recent article with Illinois Public Media: "More than half of non-Spanish-speaking U.S. Latinos have been shamed". Dr. Montrul gives her commentary on the results of a recent Pew Research Center survey on Spanish speakers in the US....
PhD Candidate Sarah Clark wins IUS Graduate Student Paper Award
2023-10-15 - Ph.D. Candidate Sarah Clark was recognized at the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society this October, where she won the IUS Graduate Student Paper Award with her paper ‘The Veteran Dialect: Discourses of Identity in the Liminal Space between Institutions and Ideologies’....
ILLS16: Update and Call for Papers
2023-10-12 - We are excited to announce that the 16th Illinois Language and Linguistics Society conference will take place March 1-2, 2024, at the I-Hotel & Illinois Conference Center! This year's theme is "Language, Mind, and Society." The plenary speakers are: Rajka Smiljanic (University of...
Silvina Montrul Ranked in Top 2% of World's Scientists according to Stanford-Elsevier Ranking
2023-10-11 - Stanford University, USA has recently updated the list of the World's Top 2% Scientists. This prestigious ranking is based based on the bibliometric information in the Scopus database and includes more than 190,000 researchers from all the world out of about 9 million scientists, with 22 scientific...
PhD Student Katherine Kwak receives Phi Kappa Phi Love of Learning Award
2023-09-27 - We are thrilled to announce that Katherine Kwak, a second-year PhD student, received external funding from the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. With the Phi Kappa Phi Love of Learning Award ($1,000), Katherine plans to build an experiment for her qualifying paper and collect data at the...
Dr. Silvina Montrul featured in The Atlantic
2023-09-27 - Congratulations to Dr. Silvina Montrul, who was recently featured in the article "The Parents Trying to Pass Down a Language They Hardly Speak" in The Atlantic magazine! This article describes the perspectives of heritage speakers in the United States and features quotes from a phone...
Meet our new OEAI Coordinator, Dr. Qiusi Zhang
2023-09-26 - This year marks the start of the first fall semester with the Linguistics Department hosting the Oral English Assessment Interview (OEAI). This interview-based assessment - formerly the English Proficiency Interview (EPI) hosted by CITL - serves as an on-campus opportunity for...
Congratulations to Professor Silvina Montrul for receiving the Marjorie Roberts Professorship in Liberal Arts & Sciences!
2023-09-22 - We are excited to announce that Dr. Silvina Montrul has been recognized with a Marjorie Roberts Professorship in Liberal Arts & Sciences! This professorship was granted based upon her excellent record of scholarship, contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and contributions to public...
Announcing the 17th meeting of Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA-17)
2023-08-30 - We are excited to announce that the 17th meeting of Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA-17) will take place here, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 2-4, 2024. Call for...
Dr. Mithilesh Mishra receives Hindi award
2023-07-31 - Congratulations to Dr. Mithilesh Mishra, Director of the Hindi and South Asian Languages Program in the Linguistics Department, for receiving the Service to Hindi Award by the International Hindi Association. The text on the Award plaque translates as follows...
Linguistics e-textbook project receives funding from LAS
2023-07-18 - The Illinois ESL Program received funding from the LAS Student Success Innovation project for redesigning and improving its in-house e-textbook, Academic Writing for English Language Learners, to deliver a more accessible, inclusive, and engaging learning experience.