Crow at Tesol and AAAL 2017

A few weeks ago members of the Crow team attended both the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference located in Portland, Oregon and the TESOL International Convention & English language expo located in Seattle, Washington.

AAAL

At AAAL we presented a poster on developing an L2 corpus. It highlighted what Crow does as a research team, the projects we have completed, and our future plans. This was a great networking opportunity that gave us the ability to talk with faculty and researchers in multiple fields.

TESOL

Members that attended TESOL had the opportunity to spend the weekend attending workshops and presentations that explained how to apply the information being presented into their very own classrooms. We presented on two different panels. The second was interdisciplinary and discussed the effectiveness of data-driven instructions on reporting verbs in L2 writing. The presentation was geared towards teachers and how they can use a corpus and repository in their own classroom. We were asked some very important questions during this panel including

Q1: Why are you presenting this project? Are you offering a model to replicate or are you promoting its usability?

Response: It depends on the context and resources of the institution. Money, time, investment, and work force are all resources that can influence the purpose of the project. With Crow we are designing a Corpus interface and resources that could be used by teachers and students at many institutions. We are also designing a model for research and development that other institutions will find valuable.

Q2: How did you do the corpus workshop in the classroom?

Response: We gave a brief overview of the previous TESOL panel (panel power-point shown below) that covered this exact topic.

Q3: How do you decide on research?

Response: Our team is graduate student driven and our research is centered around their interests. The projects Crow pursues are developed in a graduate practicum lab in collaboration with faculty and an interdisciplinary team. This studio-based format for research development allows for both short term and long term research plans that support graduate student professional development, and also helps us to maintain a flexible model that can grow and change based on the interests of current students.