Raymond-Jean Frontain, professor of English, recently took part with playwright Terrence McNally in a symposium on McNally’s plays in the Theology and Theater program at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City. Frontain was in New York to also attend the opening of the revival of McNally’s “The Ritz.” Most recently Frontain has published “Tuning the World: Traherne, Psalms, and Praise” in Re-Reading Thomas Traherne: A Collection of New Critical Essays, ed. Jacob Blevins (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2007); “Registering Donne’s Voiceprints: Additional Reverberations,” John Donne Journal 26 (2007); and a theater notes column on McNally’s “Some Men” in Gay and Lesbian Review (Sept.-Oct. 2007).
Paulette Bane, a graduate assistant in UCA?s English Department, recently presented at the 6th Biennial Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) Conference held in Little Rock. Part of Bane?s presentation, “A Space of their Own? Feminist Civic Discourse at Southern Universities,” included a short film that featured fellow English graduate student Katie Evans as well as UCA faculty members Lynn Burley, Department of Writing, Wendy Lucas Castro, Department of History, Mary Ruth Marotte, Department of English, and Julia Winden Fey, Department of Philosophy and Religion.
Shoudong Feng and Tammy Benson, of UCA’s Department of Early Childhood and Special Education, recently published their research titled “The Language Patterns of Preschool Children in the Computer Environment” in The Journal of Research in Childhood Education of the Association for Childhood Education International. The article described the language patterns of eight preschool students in a computer environment. Videotaped interactions at the computer center were analyzed to examine the nature of the verbal interaction that took place among peers. Using Halliday’s functional framework, the authors found that regulatory was the most popular language pattern, followed by heuristic and representational. The results of this study reveal the scope and variety of preschool children’s language in the computer environment and may help early childhood educators understand how preschool children use language to interact with each other.
