Hello!
I am currently pursuing my doctoral degree in Information Science with a concentration in Linguistics at the University of North Texas. I am studying under Dr. Shobhana Chelliah and collaborating on research projects which involve orthography development for minority languages in the North East Indian region and facilitating literacy by speakers in these language groups. I anticipate becoming a doctoral candidate by the summer of 2023 with a dissertation defense in 2024. I earned my Masters in Linguistics at the University of North Texas in 2015.
More broadly, my personal research interests are focused on all things written language, including many aspects of grapholinguistics (graphemics, orthographies, writing systems, etc.) as well as literacy processing and acquisition, particularly in the L2 context. My research goals are to revisit issues dealing with written language and literacy with grapholinguistics perspectives. Many topics have only been approached by traditional linguistics perspectives or social semiotic perspectives. I believe the literature on many of these issues (e.g., orthography development, L2 literacy acquisition, kanji/hanzi analysis, emoji use, etc.) could benefit from a grapholinguistic perspective.
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I greatly enjoy collaboration on these topics! Please contact me if you wish to collaborate on a research project.
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Outside of academia, I am a Lead Consultant and Application Architect for a Salesforce Consulting Partner, Vicasso. I enjoy solving complex business problems with Salesforce technology and finding solutions to tricky technical issues.
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Academia is my passion but when I need a break I enjoy travelling and learning about new languages and cultures. I currently live north of Dallas, TX with my spouse and our pets!
Contact
I love collaboration on projects. Please contact me if you wish to collaborate or have any questions about my research.
Email me! rachelgarton@my.unt.edu