Jeffrey Reaser

Bio

Jeffrey Reaser is Professor of English at North Carolina State University where he serves as Director of Undergraduate Programs and Director of Undergraduate Advising. He also coordinates the secondary English education program and serves as associate director of the Language and Life Project at NC State. He has worked extensively on formal and information education projects related to documenting, celebrating, and expanding knowledge of dialects and language variation, including the development and testing of the nation’s first state-based dialect awareness program, Voices of North Carolina: Language and Life from the Atlantic to the Appalachians (Reaser and Wolfram 2007). He has published four books and more than twenty academic articles/book chapters. His first book, Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina (2014), co-authored with Walt Wolfram, won the 2014 book award from the North Caroliniana Society. His book Critical Language Pedagogy: Interrogating Language, Dialects, and Power in Teacher Education (2018), co-authored with Amanda Godley, won the 2020 ELATE Richard A. Meade Award from the National Council of Teachers of English. He has also published Dialects at School: Educating Linguistically Diverse Students (2017) and Language Variety in the New South: Contemporary Perspectives on Change and Variation (2018). He has given lectures at local, state, national, and international conferences, as well as to many civics and educational groups. He was awarded the CHASS Outstanding Advisor Award in 2009, the CHASS Outstanding Teacher Award in 2010 at which time he was inducted into the Academy of Outstanding Teachers at NC State, and the CHASS Outstanding Undergraduate Professor Award in 2013. He is past chair of the Language in the School Curriculum Committee of the Linguistics Society of America and has served on the executive committees of the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics and the American Dialect Society. In 2016, he won the first Lifetime Mentoring Award given by the NCSU Undergraduate Research Student Advisory Council. He also serves as Associate Editor for teaching and pedagogy for American Speech.

Responsibilities

Director or Undergraduate Programs & Director of Undergraduate Advising

Coordinator – BA English: Secondary English Education concentration

Associate Director – Langauge and Life Project at NC State

Extension and Community Engagement

Associate producer of Talking Black in America, the first documentary-length film on the nations most controversial and misunderstood dialect.

Contributor to the Linguistics Society of America exhibit at the USA Science and Engineering Festival, April 25-27, 2014, in Washington, DC. (along with David Pippin, Dennis Preston, and Walt Wolfram).

http://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2014/04/29/lsa-represented-science-engineering-festival

Reaser, Jeffrey, Paula Dickerson Boddie, Walt Wolfram, DeAnna Locke, Chester Lynn, and Phillip Howard. 2011. Ocracoke Still Speaks: Reflections Past and Present. Oral history CD and book. A collaboration between the North Carolina Language and Life Project at NC State and the Ocracoke Preservation Society.

Reaser, Jeffrey, and Walt Wolfram. 2011. Voices of North Carolina: An Interactive Webinar for 8th Grade Social Studies Teachers. 3-part, 10-hour webinar. A partnership between the North Carolina Language and Life Project at NC State and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. http://ncsu.edu/linguistics/webinar.php

Reaser, Jeffrey. 2009. Webinar for using Voices of North Carolina in the classroom (written, produced, and directed) http://www.ncsu.edu/linguistics/education/Curriculum/Webinar/CurriculumWebinar-Sequence1.mov

Reaser, Jeffrey, and Walt Wolfram. 2007 (previous version 2005). Voices of North Carolina: Language and Life from the Atlantic to the Appalachians (second edition). Teachers manual, student workbook, and resource DVDs. [NC DPI endorsed] (http://www.ncsu.edu/linguistics/education/dialectcurriculum.php)

Research Publications

Books: 

Godley, Amanda J. and Jeffrey Reaser. (2018). Critical Language Pedagogy: Interrogating Language, Dialects, and Power in Teacher Education. Peter Lang Publishing.

Reaser, Jeffrey, Eric Wilbanks*, Karissa Wojcik*, and Walt Wolfram (Eds.). (2018) Language Variety in the New South: Contemporary Perspectives on Change and Variation. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press.

Reaser, Jeffrey, Carolyn Temple Adger, Donna Christian, and Walt Wolfram. April 2017. Dialects at School: Educating Linguistically Diverse Students. New York: Routledge.

Wolfram, Walt, and Jeffrey Reaser. 2014. Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press.

Articles: 

Bissonnette, Jeanne Dyches, Jeffrey Reaser, Jessica Hatcher, and Amanda Joan Godley. 2016. Regional Differences in Pre-Service Teachers’ Responses to Critical Language Pedagogies. Southern Journal of Linguistics, 40(1): 1-39.

Reaser, Jeffrey. 2016. The Effectiveness of Webinars as a Tool for Sociolinguistic-Based Teacher Professional Development. American Speech, 91(2): 235-254.

Godley, Amanda J., Jeffrey Reaser, and Kaylan G. Moore. 2015. Pre-Service English Language Arts Teachers’ Development of Critical Language Awareness for Teaching. Linguistics and Education, 32: 41-54.

Reaser, Jeffrey, and Caroline Myrick. 2015. Writing Language-based Trade Books: Making Linguistics Accessible to Lay Audiences. Language and Linguistic Compass, 9(5): 198-208.

Reaser, Jeffrey. 2010. Using Media to Teach about Language. Language and Linguistic Compass, 4: 782-792.

Wolfram, Walt, Jeffrey Reaser, and Charlotte Vaughn. 2008. Operationalizing Linguistic Gratuity: From Principle to Practice. Language and Linguistic Compass, 2:1109-1134.

Reaser, Jeffrey, and Carolyn Temple Adger. 2007. Developing Language Awareness Materials for Non-Linguists: Lessons Learned from the Do You Speak American? Project. Language and Linguistic Compass, 1.3: 155-167.

Reaser, Jeffrey. 2004. A Quantitative Sociolinguistic Analysis of Bahamian Copula Absence: Morphosyntactic Evidence from AbacoIsland, The Bahamas. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 19: 1-40.

Thomas, Erik R., and Jeffrey Reaser. 2004. Delimiting Perceptual Cues Used for the Ethnic Labeling of African American and European American Voices.  Journal of Sociolinguistics, 8:54-86.

Reaser, Jeffrey. 2003. A Quantitative Approach to (Sub)Registers: The Case of ‘Sports Announcer Talk’. Discourse Studies, 5(3): 303-321.

Book Chapters:

Reaser, Jeffrey. 2020. Language Varieties and Education. In Susan Conrad, Alissa Hartig, and Lynn Santelmann (Eds.), The Cambridge Introduction to Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 173-186.

Myrick, Caroline, Nicole Eberle, Joel Schneier, and Jeffrey Reaser. 2020. Mapping Linguistic Diversity in the English-Speaking Caribbean. In Stanley D. Brunn (Ed.), The Changing World Language Map. New York: Springer Science + Business Media. 1470-1487. (25% contribution)

Hatcher, Jessica, & Jeffrey Reaser. 2019. Bringing Critical Language Pedagogy to the Middle School Social Studies Classroom: Lessons for Standard English Learners. In Michelle Devereaux and Chris Palmer (Eds.), Teaching Language Variation in the Classroom: Strategies and Models from Teacher and Linguists. New York: Routledge. 93-108.

Reaser, Jeffrey. 2018. Language Awareness Programs: Building Students’ and Teachers’ Sociolinguistic Knowledge. In Carolyn Temple Adger, Catherin E. Snow, and Donna Christian (Eds.), What Teachers Need to Know about Language (second edition). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. 125-134.

Reaser, Jeffrey. 2018. Introduction. In Jeffrey Reaser, Eric Wilbanks, Karissa Wojcik, and Walt Wolfram (Eds.), Language Variety in the New South: Change and Variation. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press. 1-17.

Thomas, Erik R. and Jeffrey Reaser. 2015. An Experiment on Cues Used for Identification of Voices as African American or European American. In Michael D. Picone and Catherine Evans Davies (eds.), Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.  Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 507-522.

Reaser, Jeffrey. 2013. Dialect and education in Appalachia. In Amy Clark and Nancy Hayward (eds.), Appalachian Englishes. University Press of Kentucky. 94-109.

Reaser, Jeffrey, and Benjamin Torbert. 2013. Morphosyntactic features of Bahamian English. In Bernd Kortmann, ed. The World Atlas of Variation in English: Grammar. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 169-179.

Reaser, Jeffrey, and Benjamin Torbert. 2011. Morphosyntactic features of Bahamian English. In Bernd Kortmann & Kerstin Lunkenheimer, eds. The Electronic World Atlas of Variation: Grammar. Max Planck Digital Library in cooperation with Mouton de Gruyter. Project website: http://www.ewave-atlas.org/ Link to my contribution: http://www.ewave-atlas.org/languages/23

Reaser, Jeffrey. 2010. Bahamian English. In Daniel Schreier, Peter Trudgill, Edgar Schneider, and Jeffrey P. Williams (eds.), The Lesser-known Varieties of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 158-170.

Reaser, Jeffrey. 2010. Developing Sociolinguistic Curricula that Help Teachers Meet Standards. In Kristen Denham and Anne Lobeck (eds.), Linguistics at School: Language Awareness in Primary and Secondary Education. Cambridge University Press. 91-105.

Reaser, Jeffrey, and Carolyn Temple Adger. 2008. Dialect Diversity in the Classroom: Research and Development. In B. Spolsky and FM Hult (eds), Handbook of Educational Linguistics. Malden,MA/Oxford: Blackwell. 161-173.

Reaser, Jeffrey. 2007. Evaluating and Improving High School Students’ Folk Perceptions of Dialects. In Lindsey Benitz and Toni Cook (eds.) The Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, 13.2.Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press. 179-192.

Reaser, Jeffrey, and Benjamin Torbert. 2005. Bahamian English: Morphology and Syntax. In Bernd Kortmann and Edgar W. Schneider (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English, Vol. 2. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 391-406.

Childs, Becky, Jeffrey Reaser, and Walt Wolfram. 2003. Defining Ethnic Varieties in the Bahamas: Phonological Accommodation in Black and White Enclave Communities. In Michael Aceto and Jeffrey P. Williams (eds.), Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean. Varieties of English Around the World G30. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1-28.

Funded Research

Language Variety in the South (LAVIS) IV Conference: The New South. National Science Foundation Award # 1451103. $32,180. 2015.

Preservice English Teachers’ Development of Sociolinguistic Knowledge for Literacy Instruction. Spencer Foundation. $40,000. 2013-2014

Voices of North Carolina in the Classroom: School/University Professional Development Initiative to Enhance Middle School Teachers’ Language and Literacy Instruction. March 2007-August 2008. $268,837. Sponsored by NC QUEST.

Area(s) of Expertise

Expansion of the Voices of North Carolina curriculum in scope and distribution through a series of teacher workshops.

Developing psychometrically valid instruments for evaluating the language attitudes of students and teachers as well as the changes to these attitudes though education.