Carl S Blyth


Carl S Blyth
Associate Professor, Department of French and Italian, College of Liberal Arts
Director, Texas Language Technology Center

Phone: +1 512 232 2312, +1 512 471 5531
Email: cblyth@austin.utexas.edu

Media Rep Contact

Daniel Oppenheimer (primary)
512-475-9712
email

Lauren Macknight (primary)
512-232-6504
email

 
 

Carl Blyth is an applied linguist with a background in interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics and technology. His research interests lie at the intersection of language, culture and interaction, particularly cross-cultural and intercultural online interaction. Blyth directs the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL), one of 15 federally-funded foreign language resource centers around the country, designed to produce and disseminate Open Educational Resources (OERs) for the Internet public (e.g., online language courses, reference grammars, assessment tools, corpora, etc.).

Currently, Blyth is examining online discussions between French and American college students taken from Cultura, an on-going telecollaboration between MIT and various French universities to demonstrate how miscommunication arises in cross-cultural discussions between French and American interlocutors who are largely unaware that their different cultures possess divergent "stance scripts," that is, culture-specific ways of expressing an opinion. His research aims to identify the elements of conversational behaviors that index cultural ways of thinking and performing.

Blyth is interested in the use of digital tools and social media to facilitate collaborative social action, exploring the use of eComma, textual annotation software developed in the English Department at the University of Texas. The goal of the eComma project is to understand how second language readers build collaborative commentaries of a given L2 text with the aid of this web-based annotation software. Blyth worked with colleagues and graduate students over the years to build a suite of online pedagogical materials for French (e.g., Tex's French Grammar, a pedagogical reference grammar; and Français interactif, a 'blended learning' environment for beginning French).

Media Rep Contact

Daniel Oppenheimer (primary)
512-475-9712
email

Lauren Macknight (primary)
512-232-6504
email