<Name>, Ph.D.

Dept. of <Dept>
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst MA 01003

Dear Dr. <Name>,

Thank you for sharing the details of your research on foreign accent and dialect perception with me.
Your research method and anticipated findings would fit nicely in the curriculum of the dialect
workshop of the <Name of Center>, next scheduled for June 2013. This biennial workshop, the
Summer Dialect Research Project (SDRP), brings 12 to 15 undergraduate scholars from around the
country to campus where they work on research topics related to African American English (AAE).
The foundational texts of the workshop are my two books on AAE published by Cambridge
University Press: AAE, A Linguistic Introduction and Language and the African American Child,
2002 and 2011, respectively. The majority of the workshop participants are speakers of AAE
themselves and can have a first-hand perspective on the effects of dialect on listeners. I believe they
will enjoy helping you with certain parts of the research and will also learn a lot from the experience.
It can be a very mutually beneficial arrangement between <Center> and your lab, <Name of lab>.

I would like to invite you to join the 2013 SDRP as a guest lecturer. We will try to schedule you
early in the session, before the participants have chosen their mini-research topics, so some of them
could select your project to work on. It will be a very attractive inducement that you can offer
financial support to the student to continue the research in your lab beyond the workshop. This
research will broaden the scope of the SDRP program into new areas and methodologies for us, and
the SDRP participants will help diversify your lab and provide a unique contribution to this research

topic.

I hope you will be able to contribute to the workshop and enlist one or more of our students for your
lab after the workshop. I look for