Diversity in conference in Japan

[Shoba Bandi Rao]

Hi!
My abstract to this conference was accepted last year. I am
non-japanese. As Brian pointed out... the reason I couldn't attend the
conference was because I couldn't get any student travel grants; and it
was way too expensive to finance myself.

Best,
Shoba

****************************************************************
Shoba Bandi Rao
Doctoral student/Applied Linguistics
New York University
Tel. Home (212) 243-4510
http://pages.nyu.edu/~sqb4972/
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On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, Brian MacWhinney wrote:

> Dear Info-CHILDES,
>   Regarding the issue of diversity in the newly-formed Japanese Society for
> Language Sciences, I would like to point to a very positive related aspect of
> this new society.  This is the extent to which the organizers of this group
> have worked proactively to encourage participation from diverse academic
> groups interested in language acquisition.  In particular, the first annual
> meeting had a good inclusion of people from Linguistics, Psychology,
> Education, Second Language Acquisition, and Speech Sciences.  I was very much
> impressed by the quality of the work presented and the extent to which
> researchers from different disciplines expressed interest in each other's
> methods and approaches.  About half of the papers were presented in English
> and about half in Japanese.  I understand zero Japanese, but there were
> abstracts in English for the papers presented in Japanese and it was usually
> easy to follow along.  I think that the organizers should be commended for
> their success in terms of achieving intellectual quality and disciplinary
> diversity.  The logistics of traveling to Japan may make it unlikely that
> non-Japanese will attend in great numbers, but if they do manage to attend, I
> think they will find this meeting quite rewarding.
>
> --Brian MacWhinney
>
>