Charlie Winnick

Charlie Winnick

Charlie Winnick

B.A Modern Language Studies, University of Salford (2015) M.A French Literature, University of Mississippi (2019)
English and French, some understanding of Spanish

Experience in the Lab and Ole Miss

I worked with Dr. Fafulas to help code written transcriptions of spoken stories by (Spanish/English) bilingual children. I would read the transcriptions and code for the subject and verb tense, person and number that they had used. We would also look for code-switching and other linguistic patterns across the English and Spanish stories. Earlier in the year I also used Praat phonetic software to highlight particular sounds in recordings of South American Spanish. 


How did your studies lead to your current employment?

This work in the Lab allowed me to see how to conduct and use linguistic research which became the focus of my thesis about Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy. This led me to my role as a foreign language teacher of French and English Language Learners at Oxford High School. Working in the Lab allowed me to further my understanding of how people use language and allowed me to work in Spanish a little more than I had before which has been a huge help with my work with our ELL population who are mostly native Spanish speakers. 


What are some challenges and rewards of your current position? 

In my role, the biggest challenge is highlighting the importance of learning a foreign language for my French students, or that learning a second language doesn’t subtract from your identity in your first language for my ELL students. The biggest rewards in my job are seeing our students excel in their work in the language of study. In our department we had 35 students volunteer for a National French test which saw over half receive State top 10 scores in their level and 3 students nationally rank. In ELL we saw some students test out of services and several improvements in the EL Proficiency Tests. From next year we will be offering the State Seal of Biliteracy for students which, we hope, will push ourselves and our students further and bring more importance to foreign languages in the community.

 
Fun facts about yourself/interests/hobbies

It probably goes without saying for someone in foreign languages, but I love to travel and experience new cultures. My wife and I are trying to visit 30 countries before turning 30, we’re both close, of course COVID altered our plans, but I think we can still get there! I also love sports, I grew up playing rugby, cricket, and soccer. Although I’m a little less active in those now, I still follow them and since moving to the US I’ve been able to understand football and baseball a lot better than I ever did in Europe.