Charlene Sato
Charlene "Charlie" Junko Sato (1951–1996) was Associate Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa until her early death in 1996. Her work sat at a seam that the field has never really closed: the same speakers who appear in SLA as "learners of English" appear in sociolinguistics as speakers of Hawai'i Creole English, and her research refused to let those descriptions stay apart.
On the SLA side, The Syntax of Conversation in Interlanguage Development (1990) was an early and careful longitudinal study of how interaction shapes L2 syntax — a Hawai'i-based counterpart to the interaction-hypothesis work coming out of UCLA and elsewhere. On the sociolinguistic side, she was a public advocate for Hawai'i Creole English, most visibly in her 1987 challenge to the Hawai'i State Board of Education's attempt to ban the variety in classrooms. The Charlene Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole and Dialect Studies was established at UH Mānoa in 2002 in her memory.
Career
- Associate Professor, Department of ESL/Second Language Studies, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
- Published widely in SLA and sociolinguistics of Hawai'i
- Died 1996
Published Work
- The Syntax of Conversation in Interlanguage Development (1990, Gunter Narr)
- "Origins of complex syntax in interlanguage development," Studies in Second Language Acquisition (1988)
- Work on sociolinguistic variation and language attitudes in Hawai'i
- Papers on decreolisation and language change in Hawai'i Creole English
Influence
- Linked SLA's interaction literature to Pidgin and Creole research in a way few others attempted
- Named carrier of the institutional legacy at UH Mānoa through the Charlene Sato Center (est. 2002)
- Continuing reference point for Hawai'i Creole English as an educational and research question