Dr. James Mischler
Director, NSU Writing Center and
Assistant Professor of English

Education

·         Ph.D., Oklahoma State University, English; specializations in Linguistics and Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL)

·         M.A., Northeastern Illinois University, Linguistics, specialization in TESL

·         M.A., Pacific Lutheran University, specialization in Higher Education Administration

·         B.S., Wichita State University, Health Care Administration

Personal Statement

I am chiefly interested in the relationship between language and the human mind, which is the main topic of modern linguistics as a field of study. In my view, the "mind" includes the physical, social, cultural, and historical contexts in which a particular person is situated, opening up a wide variety of possible points of view for studying language. These points of view include theoretical studies of language structure, socio-historical studies of language communities, and psycholinguistic studies of language processing in the brain. My own research methods involve investigating language at multiple levels in order to apply the results to solve practical human problems, such as developing improvements in language teaching pedagogy.

Research Interests

·         Metaphor and narrative as linguistic, cultural, and cognitive constructions

·         English syntax

·         Grammar teaching pedagogy

·         Language testing

·         English for Academic Purposes (EAP)       

·         Second Language Acquisition

Courses

·         Syntactical Theories

·         Advanced Grammar

·         History of the English Language

·         Argumentative Writing

·         Introduction to Analytical Writing

·         Research Writing

·         Principles of Second Language Learning and Instruction

 I am also in the process of developing several new courses, including phonetics & phonology, corpus linguistics, TESL methodology, and cognitive linguistics.

Selected publications:

The Edge of Anger: Metaphor and Category Boundaries.  In S. Coulson, Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language.  Stanford, California: CSLI. Forthcoming

The Cognition/Culture Continuum: A Historical Study of Metaphor. In M. Noonan (Ed.), Formulaic Language: Vol. 1. Structure, Distribution, Historical Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2009.

Expressive Phonology as Evaluative Comment in Personal Oral Narrative: The ‘Play Frame’ and Language Learning. System, 36(2), 241-252. 2008.

The Oral Narrative Competence of Two Non-Native Speakers of English. In S. Buescher & K. Holley (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth Annual High Desert Linguistics Society Conference (pp. 59-69). Albuquerque, NM: Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico. 2007.