Organizations & Presidents
Our School offers courses in language, literature, linguistics, culture, civilization, and film. We provide instruction in the target languages as well as some courses in English, in face to face, online, and blended formats, and instruction for heritage speakers of Chinese and Spanish. SLC faculty members cover a richly diverse range of research areas and have received international acclaim for their scholarship. One of SLC’s strengths lies in its offerings of classes in languages for specialized purposes. These classes equip students with the practical communication skills they will need for using the target language while studying or traveling abroad, participating in internships, or preparing for globally oriented career paths.
Heather Offerman, SLC President
Heather Offerman is a third year PhD student in the department of Hispanic Linguistics. Her research focuses on second language acquisition, phonetics and phonology, Spanish phonetics, sociophonetics and second language pronunciation instruction. She is more specifically interested in discovering the effectiveness of computer assisted language learning tools on second language learner pronunciation development. She earned her MA from Purdue in 2014 and is currently working her dissertation. She has been teaching a variety of Spanish courses to university students for a total of seven years.
We are the interdisciplinary student organization for inquisitive minds interested in probing the depths of language. We create a strong support network for our members' intellectual growth. We foster mentor relationships, inform our members of linguistic research opportunities, host professionalization and educational workshops, and more. The Purdue Linguistics Association is comprised of both undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty members from across campus. This year, PLA co-hosts and facilitates the weekly Ling Lunches with the Linguistics Program.
Roderick Clare, PLA President
Originally from Chicago, Roderick is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Linguistics program at Purdue University. His principle areas of interest are Korean linguistics, acoustic phonetics, acquisition of second language phonology, and foreign language education. Currently, he is researching the effects of phonological neighborhood density on sound symbolism in Korean.
ESL GO! is a non-profit professional organization which unites people whose primary interests relate to teaching and researching English as a second or foreign language. ESL GO! was established in 2008 by graduate students in Second Language Studies/ESL at Purdue University. Second Language Studies/ESL at Purdue University is offered through the Department of English. The program features a diverse graduate student population, which creates an environment where multiple perspectives are welcomed and long held assumptions are challenged. Nationally and internationally recognized for their scholarship, faculty members specialize in second language writing, language and assessment, world Englishes, and applied linguistics.
Parva Panahi, ESL GO! President
Parva Panahi is a third-year Ph.D. student in the SLS program and the current president of the English as a Second Language Graduate Student Organization (ESL GO!). She graduated from the University of Tehran with a B.A. in English Language and Literature and Allameh Tabataba’ei University with an M.A. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Her academic studies at Purdue are mainly focused on second language writing, and her particular areas of interest include the internationalization of writing programs, teaching writing to multilingual students, and the development of intercultural competence in composition courses.