Professor Emerita
lise.winer [at] mcgill.ca (E-mail)
Areas of interest
- Second language teaching methodology
- Second language materials and curriculum development
- Sociolinguistics (historical, educational, contact)
- Language and Literature, Language and Lyrics
- Caribbean English Creoles (Trinidad & Tobago)
- Lexicography
Description of research/teaching activities
- Teaching EDSL 617: “Advanced Second Language Education Methods”, Spring 2013. Whether we have considerable training with a particular method or approach, or we have a lot of classroom experience, it is always useful to be able to analyze the methodological underpinnings of materials and techniques. Then we can more appropriately and logically develop a meaningful “eclectic” methodology for a particular context.
- Writing a series of EFL readers for Haitian schools (with Beverly Baker). Within a framework of teacher development and support, we are responding to requests for graded readers in English that are culturally, linguistically and pedagogically appropriate for Haitian students.
- Researching language use in Montreal Hip-Hop (with Mela Sarkar and Bronwen Low). The innovative and exciting use of multilingual rap lyrics in Montreal hip-hop is a great site for understanding current developments in the use of languages in Quebec.
- Translating and commentary on 19th-20th century newspaper texts from Trinidad & Tobago. Newspaper columns in “dialect” (local English and English Creole) are a rich source of linguistic and sociolinguistic data.
- Writing on the “Transplantation and diffusion of edible and medicinal plants to Trinidad: Botanical and linguistic evidence” (with Yasmin Baksh Comeau) How was the ethno-botanical knowledge of indigenous peoples transferred to or re-learned by incomers in the Caribbean? What implications does this have for fighting corporate proprietary patent rights on developing native plant medicines?
Student Supervision
My current graduate student supervisees are working in areas including:
- Mother-tongue (Creole) education in Haiti
- Preferred reading strategies in Quebec secondary ESL classes.
- Use of English in the Quebec ESL classroom
- Teacher Integration of New Classroom Technologies
- Linguistic Gender Difference in Online Dating Profiles
- Adapting the Quebec French Immersion Model to Foreign Language Teaching in Jamaica
- Learning strategies of multilingual learners
Recent Publications
Books
Winer, L. (2009) Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago. Montreal: McGill Queens U. Press, 1039 pp.
Winer, L. (2007) Badjohns, bhaaji & banknote blue: Essays on the social history of language in Trinidad and Tobago. St. Augustine, Trinidad: U. of the West Indies, School of Continuing Studies, 449 pp.
Book Chapters
Winer, L. (2012). “Coolie Types”: On the use of photo elicitation in collecting and verifying Indic lexicon in Trinidad & Tobago. In J. Allsopp & J.R. Rickford (Eds.). Language, Culture and Caribbean Identity. Mona, Jamaica: U. of the West Indies Press.
Winer, L. (2012). Susu not sousou: Nationalism, prescriptivism and etymology in a postcolonial creole language orthography. In Carol Percy and Mary Catherine Davidson (Eds.) The languages of nation: Attitudes and norms. (pp. 223-242) Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Winer, L. (2010) Historical naming strategies for fauna in Trinidad & Tobago English/ Creole. In J. Considine (Ed.), Webs of words: New studies in historical lexicology. (pp. 112-140) Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Winer, L. & Buzelin, H. (2008). Literary representations of creole languages: Cross-linguistic perspectives from the Caribbean. In J. V. Singler & S. Kouwenberg (Eds.) Handbook of pidgin and creole linguistics (pp. 637-665) Oxford: Blackwell.
Winer, L. (2006). Current approaches to teaching English to Caribbean-background students in the Caribbean and North America. In Shondel Nero (Ed.) Dialects, Englishes, creoles and education. (pp. 105-118) Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Journal Articles
Winer, L. (2007). No ESL in English schools: Language policy in Quebec and implications for TESL teacher education. TESOL Quarterly, 41(3), 489-508.
Low, B., Sarkar, M. & Winer, L. (2008). “Ch’us mon propre Bescherelle”: Challenges from the Hip-Hop nation to the Quebec nation. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13(1), 1-24.
Sarkar, M. & Winer, L. (2006). Multilingual code-switching in Quebec rap: Poetry, pragmatics, and performativity. International Journal of Multilingualism, 3(3), 173-192.
