Scott Sterling

Welcome

I am an Associate Professor of Linguistics and TESL at Indiana State University. My main areas of research include: (1) meta-research in linguistics, and (2) research ethics in applied linguistics.

In addition to research, I focus heavily on community engagement and science communication efforts within my local community. Linguistics and second language studies are utterly fascinating topics, yet most people don't seem to know all that much about them. When I discuss linguistics with people (sorry random person sitting next to me on an airplane but you did ask what I do for a living!!), I find that people have a multitude of interesting questions on all things language related. They ask why language works in a particular way or what is the hardest language to learn. They are interested in why they struggled to learn a new language in school or why anyone would want to study linguistics in college. Taking our research and expertise to a more diverse audience (instead of only talking to other scholars) is rewarding, fun, but also useful to the health of our field. For more information on some of my projects, see the Community Engagement tab.