Department of Applied Linguistics and ESL at GSU

Virtual conference update! Dr. Ute Römer and several AL graduate students participated in the 6th Annual Law and Corpus Linguistics Conference hosted by Brigham Young University today! Take a look at https://corpusconference.byu.edu/2021-home/ if you’re interested in the topics that were covered at the event.

AAAL 2021 in numbers! See you there, ALESLers!

Congratulations to PhD student Analynn P Bustamante and recent PhD grad Selahattin Yilmaz on their latest publication, a book chapter on Exploring the essay rating judgments of English teachers in the Middle East! https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030532536

This webinar may be of interest to some of you! (MA students, check with your advisors about counting this towards your PD requirement)

Who else is excited about the first all-virtual AAAL conference in a couple of months? See you there, ALESLers!

Happy New Year, all! Excellent news from Drs. Eric Friginal and our PhD grad Jack Hardy, whose edited handbook on Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis was just published, and has contributions from AL faculty, alums, and current PhD students: Profs. Scott Crossley and Viviana Cortes; PhD students Rachelle Udell, Andy Schneider; and Drs. Magdi Kandil, Audrey Roberson, Stephen Skalicky, Jessica Lian, William Lake, Rurik Tywoniw, Jennifer Roberts (MA alum), together with notable researchers in the field. https://www.routledge.com//Friginal-H/p/book/9780367201814

Exciting publication news! GATESOL in Action’s latest issue Supporting Multilingual Learners in the Era of COVID-19" includes articles by PhD student Ndeye Bineta Mbodj and PhD alumna Dr. Mackenzie Bristow (Emory University). Several GSU alumni serve on this special issue as well: Dr. David Chiesa (UGA) is a co-editor and Dr. James Garner (University of Florida), Dr. Sarah Goodwin (University of Michigan), and Dr. Nicole Pettitt (Youngstown State University) are on the Editorial Review Board. Congratulations, all!! http://georgiatesoljournal.org//GATESOL/issue/view/fall2020

Thanks so much to our fabulous MA/PhD alum Dr. Cindy Berger, Senior Learning Scientist at Duolingo, for her amazing Zoom lecture for our MA and PhD students taking AL 8620 "Technology and Language Teaching," under Dr. Eric Friginal! Great to learn about impressive work and projects currently being conducted at Duolingo with leadership from applied linguists and language teachers/researchers!!

We have a new ABD in ALESL this Fall 2020! Congratulations to PhD candidate Yunjung (Eunice) Nam for successfully defending her dissertation proposal entitled, "A Mixed Methods Multi-Case Study on Assessment in Online Language Classes: Exploring Teachers’ Language Assessment Literacy and Learner Perceptions." Here's Eunice with her dissertation committee: Drs. Sara Cushing (Chair), Eric Friginal, YouJin Kim, and Meg Malone (Georgetown University). Congratulations, Eunice!

Exciting news for Dr. YouJin Kim, who has just accepted an invitation to become an Associate Editor of the Journal of Second Language Writing! Congratulations, YouJin!!

The American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2021 will be a virtual conference on March 20-23, 2021. Many ALESLers (faculty, students, and alums) are presenting individual papers, and our very own Dr. Ute Römer will be delivering one of the plenary talks. Please check out the abstract of Dr. Römer's presentation in the link below. Congratulations to Dr. Römer and we hope to see many of you virtually in AAAL 2021!! https://www.aaal.org/2021-plenary-ute-rmer

Conference News! Congratulations to doctoral students, Andrew Schneider, Rachelle Udell, and Ashleigh Cox, with Dr. Eric Friginal, for successfully presenting their papers virtually at the Japan Association for English Corpus Studies (JAECS) Conference 2020.

Corpus Linguistics 2021, Limerick (July 13-17, 2021) - Call for Papers out now: https://www.dropbox.com//CL2021%20%20Call%20for%20Papers.

Congratulations to Dr. Scott Crossley, who just had an op-ed piece published in La Opinion, the largest Spanish newspaper in the US! Spanish speakers, check it out at: https://laopinion.com//en-la-era-del-covid-19-la-retroali/

Congratulations to two of our undergraduate students, Kobe Ashley and Maurice Thomas, on becoming Language and Literacy Research Fellows with GSU's Center for Research on the Challenges on the Acquisition of Language and Literacy for the 2020-2021 academic year! Best of luck with your research, both!

Exciting news from Dr. Scott Crossley about his latest external funding award: In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the National Science Foundation has awarded GSU (with Scott Crossley as Principal Investigator) an NSF Convergence Accelerator grant to host a conference entitled "Improving Online Education Through Technology, Research, and Data." The conference will bring together researchers, developers, and practitioners to discuss the improvement of educational technologies for distance or remote learning for K-12 and higher education. These collaborations will inform best practices in educational technology design and generate opportunities for future development and testing. Congratulations, Scott!

Orientation 2020 for all incoming PhD and MA students: We'll have to make do with Zoom screenshots for now, here are pictures of some of our new PhD and MA students, together with ALESL graduate faculty during our new graduate students' orientation last Friday (21st). Welcome all and have an amazing Fall semester (and stay safe and healthy!).

You thought we were done announcing new doctors for the summer, didn't you?! Well not quite... We're excited to announce our newest PhD graduate, Dr. Selahattin Ylmaz, who has just successfully defended his dissertation entitled "A Constructional Analysis of Written Academic English as a Lingua Franca: The Case of Unedited and Edited Research Writing". Selahattin's committee consisted of Drs. Ute Römer (chair), Diane Belcher, Stephanie Lindemann, and Anna Mauranen. Congratulations, Selahattin!!

Exciting news for freshly minted Dr. Rurik Tywoniw, who has just accepted a position as English Placement Test coordinator at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign! Congratulations, Rurik!!