Professor Kirk Hazen of West Virginia University spoke on a topic that has been very close to the faculty in ELWS for the last few years: namely, dialectal variation in the College Writing and English classroom. Hazen discussed linguistic variation in English across time as well as region, class, and race, and discussed strategies for negotiating these kinds of dialectal differences and Standard English in the classroom.
Professor Hazen is a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at West Virginia University. He has published several books and numerous articles on language and dialect variation, and he directs the West Virginia Dialect Project.