UIC Alumna and Current LAS Linguistic Lecturer on the power of our words

Name: Dr. Jill Hallett

Title: Lecturer

Department: Linguistics

Tell me a little bit about your history at UIC/U of I?

The UI system and I go waaaaay back to 1995 when I started as a freshman at UIUC and finished up my BA in English in 2000 at UIC. Six years later, I began my doctoral work in Linguistics at UIUC and graduated in 2012. I started teaching at UIC in Curriculum & Instruction in the College of Education in 2013 and in Linguistics in 2020, the semester we went on lockdown. I’m one of the lucky few who went from adjunct to Visiting Lecturer to Lecturer, which I’m officially beginning this fall.

You know that annoying toddler who keeps asking, “But why???” I never really grew out of it. I want to know everything I can about everything that interests me and I want to be able to talk about topics of importance from an informed perspective. It’s funny because when I’m not interested, I can skate by with a B-/ C+, but when I am interested, I get four master’s degrees and a PhD.

I’m forever talking to my students about cultivating their “humanities brains.”  From my experience being a person in the world for almost half a century, I’ve realized that the ability to ask innovative, creative, probing questions of various texts is what inspires movements. My students at UIC and elsewhere have had coursework across most of the colleges and they often comment about how many opportunities LAS courses offer for them to practice and build their capacity for this type of questioning.

I make my coursework as authentic as I can to the people in front of me. For example, I had several students in my Language and Discrimination course who have the knowledge and skills to do amazing things with coding and computation I couldn’t even dream of. They know how to automate tasks and build chatbots and make life better and more efficient in so many ways. So we read some news articles about ways chatbots and large language models have caused harm through housing and employment discrimination. These are students who are about to graduate with full-time jobs in the tech industry, so I was doing what I could to make sure they had considered their ethical frameworks and what they would do if they encounter biases in their own work or the work of others.

I hope my students build their capacity for interest, open-mindedness, and inclusive approaches to their lives. I hope they question “that’s the way we’ve always done it” institutional cultures. I hope they stay true to their ethics. I hope they notice that names for things or people or actions have layers of meaning worthy of interrogation. I hope more than anything that they realize they already have within them the ability to make the world better, even in the smallest of ways.

How did you become interested in linguistics?

It all started at UIC, actually! I took an English course in which we read postcolonial literature and one of the texts was Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and I was CAPTIVATED by the way he wrote his characters’ dialogue. There are certain books that have chapters written from the perspective of different characters like The Joy Luck Club and The Poisonwood Bible and you can tell after a while which character “wrote” that chapter without even looking, you know? Well, I grew up around Devon and had an ear for Indian English before I knew that was even a thing.

While I was teaching high school English, I wanted an endorsement to teach ESL, which was housed in a Linguistics department at that time. I ended up falling in love with linguistics for the combination of structure, function, social construction, and analytical frameworks. When I took a World Englishes course, I thought back to how Rushdie captured dialect in writing and I ended up doing my thesis on the language in two of his novels. Meanwhile, I’m looking at my high school classes being taught literature that completely ignores their language (this was 2006; it’s getting better… slowly). I couldn’t stop thinking about language in literature and went on for my doctorate, where I started out researching Chinua Achebe and Terry McMillan and ended up writing my dissertation on teachers’ orientations toward African American English in Chicago classrooms.

I came to UIC as a student in 1998 after feeling like a misfit at three other colleges and universities. Truly, my heart was in Chicago, my happy place. I am most comfortable when I can alternately socialize and retreat, where the people around me go different places and do different things when they’re not in class; furthermore, college town life was not my jam. I came to LAS because, frankly, I could graduate most quickly in English with the credits I had, even though I knew I wanted to teach eventually. With professors like Luis Urrea (I had him before he was super-famous!), I learned to use writing as a creative outlet for processing my thoughts and feelings, a strategy I still use as a grown-up researcher to ask questions, organize ideas, and speak truth to power.

As an instructor, I feel like I’m home. I can relate to my students who work, who commute, who struggle, who ask for help, who are bright and funny and give me hope. In the late 90s, I would never have imagined myself back here teaching, but from 2024, it all makes sense to me.

Advice for new students?

I was the first in my family to go to college. There’s a procedural knowledge that comes with educational systems that I didn’t know I didn’t know. I applied to one school. I went where my friends went. I read the instructions and picked my classes and got overwhelmed by the readings and got a LOT of Cs and ended up taking two classes I didn’t need to take because I was too insecure to ask for help.

Lesson 1: Ask for help. Talk to your professors (we’re nerdy, yes, but we actually do care and some of us have snacks for you).

I didn’t finish in four years, or even five. It doesn’t actually matter.

What matters was what I learned along the way, what I was able to notice once I realized I needed the space to breathe and look around, which I couldn’t do as a full-time student.

When you’re in grind mode, just trying to fly under the radar and fake-it-‘til-you-make-it, do school, and leave, you don’t see the resources around you. I have recently made it a point to visit the UIC Cultural Centers and student support resources so I can share them with students. It’s not always possible to advocate for yourself so build a network of trusted people who can support you. I try to pay attention to what my students need and be ready with what I can.

Overarching lesson: Don’t get stuck in a script for your life. Leave room for imagination and surprise. Take care of yourself. Take care of others when you can.