APPLAWS, Summer 2019

Hadi Banat designed and delivered two Crow outreach workshops: one for Computers and Writing 2019 in East Lansing, Michigan, and one at the Council Writing Program Administrators 2019 (CWPA) in Baltimore, Maryland. With the Transculturation team, he presented the project’s pilot results at CWPA, too.

With Emily Palese and Shelley Staples, Banat sent a proposal about Crow’s repository development for the TESOL Conference to take place in Colorado on March 2020. He mentored undergraduate interns in the Transculturation Lab and coded dissertation data. His article “English in Lebanon: Policy Making, Education, and User Agency” was one of nine articles to get published in the special Middle East North African (MENA) Issue of the World Englishes Journal.

Bradley Dilger attended C&W 2019 in East Lansing, presenting with Hadi Banat and Michelle McMullin about Crow’s HWW grant and sharing the Crow interface with new audiences with Emily Jones. He presented with Banat at CWPA 2019 in Baltimore as well.

Wendy Gao has been developing four new test forms for Purdue Language and Culture Exchange Program (PLaCE) since Summer 2018. After rounds of revisions and reorganization, all the new test forms are available for use; the new ACE-in test will be administered by PLACE to more than 600 incoming undergraduate students at Purdue this fall.

Gao co-authored a book chapter with April Ginther, “L2 Speaking: Theory and Research,” submitting their latest draft in May. Her proposal to MWaLT (Midwest Association of Language Testers) Conference 2019—“Concept Mapping for Guiding Rater Training in an ESL Elicited Imitation Assessment”—was accepted. It is a study about rater disagreement on evaluating the listen and repeat sentence items for ACE-in.

Ge Lan cooperated with two Purdue SLS students to publish an article in System, “ Does L2 write proficiency influence noun phrase complexity? A case analysis of argumentative essays written by Chinese students in a first-year composition course.” The data was from the PSLW corpus (which is an old version of the Crow corpus).

Jhonatan Henao-Munoz attended the ATISA Summer School in Translation and Interpreting and participated in a corpus reading group with Aleksy Novikov. He also participated in the internship on Digital Humanities and Podcasting from National Humanities Center at San Diego State University.

Emily Palese and Hannah Morgan Gill piloted and made improvements to the repository intake form that developed with Banat last spring. They also collected and processed over 200 materials from UA instructors for the repository. Emily made a Processing Guide to help future Crowbirds follow our steps.

Adriana Picoral was selected as an Arizona Data Science Ambassador. She had two papers selected to NWAV48 (New Ways of Analyzing Variation), the flagship sociolinguistics conference. Adriana also dedicated a lot of time to Crow, processing files for both ASLW and MACAWS, and improving our processing methods. She’s most excited about working with Mark Fullmer and other Crowbirds to develop a tool that will improve of Crow’s integration of corpus and repository.

Samantha Pate Rappuhn, a former Purdue undergraduate researcher, was hired as Grants and Academic Projects Coordinator for Ivy Tech Community College, working on the Kokomo, Indiana campus.

Ji-young Shin had an internship during the summer where she participated in multiple research projects. Her book review on response processes validity is in print now (Language Testing). A book chapter on stance features (Crow-data-based research presented during the TaLC) is in review. She received a small external grant (Language Learning Dissertation Grant). Lastly, she was invited to review a couple peer-reviewed journals and made a debut as an official reviewer.

Shelley Staples was accepted as a Center for Undergraduate Education Scholarship (CUES) Fellow, with $50,000 in funding to support the development and evaluation of corpus-based pedagogical materials for the SLW classes at UA in Summer 2019. She had three journal articles accepted, one with Ge Lan for Journal of Second Language Writing on complexity in SLW, one for Register Studies, a multidimensional analysis of healthcare communication, and one for Language Testing on a multidimensional analysis of L2 written assessment. A fourth paper is now in press for a Routledge book on triangulating research methods (corpus linguistics and assessment).

She presented on multimodality in Crow, with Jeroen Gevers at the Computers and Writing conference and three papers at the Corpus Linguistics conference in Cardiff, Wales: one paper on the MD analysis of healthcare (Register Studies article mentioned above), one on an MD analysis of spoken oral assessment (see book chapter above), and a third on L2 writing complexity in the British Academic Written English corpus (a follow up from a 2016 Written Communication article).

Shelley also began her duties as Associate Director of Second Language Writing in the UA Writing Program and created versions of two of L2 writing courses for the micro campus in Lima, Peru, with Chris Tardy.

David Stucker worked as an intern for an industrial welding application firm in Greenfield, Indiana. He developed documentation for the operation and installation of an automated spark plug ground electrode welding system under contract from Federal-Mogul in France. He also developed a set of standardized manual templates and wrote a company style guide.

Ali Yayali was hired as an RA for the education extension of a grant-funded (USDA) environmental science project (SBAR) and started working with a secondary science teacher. He will design literacy and writing lessons and activities and work with English Language Learners (ELLs) in science classrooms particularly. This will help him as an initial step towards solidifying his plans to focus on scientific writing by L2 writers, secondary school genres, and the language of science. Ali also helped the Arizona Crowbirds write a proposal for the AZTESOL Conference.