Rate My Professor Cindy Schneider

Dr. Cindy Schneider is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of New England. She brings over 30 years of professional experience in language documentation and description, particularly of Pacific languages, sociolinguistics encompassing language policy, planning, attitudes, and practices, and applied linguistics including language and literacy teaching, mutual intelligibility, and language in legal settings. Her academic qualifications include a Bachelor of Science in Business/Marketing with a French minor from the University of Delaware, a Graduate Diploma in Linguistics from the University of New England, a Master of Arts in Linguistics from the University of Oregon, a PhD in Linguistics from the University of New England, and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of New England completed in 2023.

Schneider has conducted extensive linguistic fieldwork in Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea in the Pacific, as well as Maasailand in Kenya. Her career trajectory features teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language at universities in the USA, Mexico, and Australia from 1996 to 2007, serving as a certified IELTS examiner for tertiary study applicants in Australia, and providing adult literacy and ESL instruction in Colorado and Oregon from 1996 to 1998, and at the New England Institute of TAFE in Armidale from 2002 to 2007. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Research Institute for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University, now the Centre for Research on Language Diversity, she joined the University of New England as a full-time academic in 2009. She has earned several teaching commendations, such as for LING244 Language and the Law in 2023 and 2022, LING544 Language and the Law in 2022, and LING101 Introduction to Linguistics and LING244 in 2011.

Among her key publications is the book A Grammar of Abma, a Language of Pentecost Island, Vanuatu (Pacific Linguistics, 2010). Prominent refereed journal articles include "English and Bislama in the Vanuatu Supreme Court: a shallow equality" (International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 2022), co-authored works with Charlotte Gooskens on intelligibility across Pentecost varieties (Dialectologia, 2019; Oceanic Linguistics, 2018; Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2017; Language Documentation and Conservation, 2016), analyses of language planning and literacy in Papua New Guinea (Current Issues in Language Planning, 2015; Written Language and Literacy, 2016), and studies on Abma grammar (Oceanic Linguistics, 2009, 2011; Anthropological Linguistics, 2008). She has contributed book chapters on Baining languages (forthcoming in The Oxford Guide to the Papuan Languages), Suru Kavian (2015), and Apma (2015).