Student Opportunities

Student scholarships

The Linguistics Program makes some of its funds available directly to students in the form of scholarships. These funds allow recipients to attend conferences or other events that contribute to their professional and academic development. Examples include the scholarships to attend the 2024 and 2025 editions of the LSA (Linguistic Society of America) conferences in New York City and Philadelphia (some pics below). All linguistics minors and majors are invited to apply!

Timing: Throughout the year.

four students at the Welcome Linguists 2024 LSA ANNUAL MEETING

Multiple students sitting down at a table eating

Group of students at the 20 LSA Annual 25 Meeting

WCU Linguistics Club

WCU’s own student linguistics club, the Linguistics Society organizes events, film viewing, games, and other fun linguistics-focused activities! For information, contact the Club advisor, Dr Sanz: isanzsanch@wcupa.edu.

Timing: Throughout the year.

WCU Linguistics Club Group Photo

WCU Linguistics Club Pizza Table

WCU Linguistics Club Stickers

Spring Speaker Series

Join us for presentations on the latest research in linguistics by scholars from around the country and abroad! Organized yearly since 2016 and open to the public. Below are the presenters at our latest Spring 2026 edition

Timing: Spring semester.

WCU Linguistics presents the 2026 spring speaker series. James Balfour (University of Glasgow). 'Dangerous by Default:' How news media (mis)represents people with schizophrenia. Many of us associate schizophrenia with violence and danger - but why? In this talk, I argue that the answer lies, at least in part, in the language of the media. Drawing on a corpus of 16,000 UK press articles, I show how methods from corpus linguistics can reveal how subtle language patterns quietly frame people with schizophrenia as 'dangerous' by default' - without ever technically lying. I show how this bias is perptuated not in eplicit statements but in cumulative implication, which makes it, I argue, both difficult to see and difficult to challenge. The talk ends by asking what we can do to change this and make media coverge of schizophrenia more accurate and tolerant. Wednesday, March 25, 2026 - 12:00PM - 1:00PM (EST) via Zoom.

WCU Linguistics presents the 2026 spring speaker series. Usree Bhattacharya (University of Georgia). The linguistics of Legibility: Disability and Multilingualism in the Age of AI. What does it mean to be legible to AI - and whose languages, which languages practices, count? This talk examinies that question through Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), communicaiton that extends beyond speech through coordinated embodied, linguistic, and technilogical resources. Drawing on longitdinal video data of Kalika, a Bengali-English bilingual child with Rett syndrome who commicates through an eye-tracking speech-generating device, I ask what multilingual, multimodal interactions looks like when AI systems are doing the listening. Current large language models cannot model Kalika's complex communicative practices - distributed across multiple languages, gaze, timing, device selections, and a multisensory, transnational family ecology. The problem, I argue, is not data scarcity but a mis-specified unit of analysis. Tuesday, April 7, 2026 - 3:20PM - 4:20PM (EST) via Zoom.

Linguistics Student Research Conference

Organized in the spring by WCU Linguistics Students, this conference brings together undergraduate and graduate students from the Philadelphia region – a great venue to present your ongoing research and get ideas for future research directions in a fun, relaxed atmosphere! Keep your eyes peeled for a call for papers in the spring (usually around February-March), with the conference being held before the end of the spring semester.

Timing: April

WCU Linguistics presents the 2026 undergraduate linguistics research conference - Friday, April 17 11AM-4:30PM, Business & Public Management Center (BPM) 213. Keynote address delivered by Dr. Innhwa Park, Languages & Cultures, West Chester Univeristy. 'Saying goodbye: the sequential organization of closings in social interation. For more information email Dr. Eirini Panagiotidou (mpanagiotidou@wcupa.edu)

Linguistics Student Conference image

Linguistics Student Conference Image