APPLAWS, Summer 2020

We promised to more often share APPLAWS posts — a celebration of the team’s Awards, Publications, Plans, Leadership, Achievements, Wooots, and Surprises. Here we go!

Hadi Banat (UMass-Boston)

Dr. Hadi Banat relocated to Boston to begin his appointment as assistant professor in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he will direct their ESL program.

Hadi writes: “I sincerely thank Bradley Dilger who supervised my dissertation defense and deposit this past summer. He and Michelle McMullin also did a wonderful job mentoring me to write for a tech comm audience during our writing group meetings in May and June while collaborating on the SIGDOC 2020 manuscript, “‘Initiating and Sustaining Student Professionalization through Grant Writing.’”

Mariana Centanin Bertho (Arizona)

Mariana Centanin Bertho developed an online course for the Portuguese Language Program. This intermediate level course focuses on the development of learners’ production of a variety of non-academic written and oral texts, such as podcasts, short movies, movie reviews, social media posts, etc. The learning objectives are also to expand learners’ vocabulary to cultural and social topics beyond their personal life, such as migration and racial issues. The course also includes data-driven activities developed with MACAWS.

She attended talks and workshops promoted by LAEL (PUC, Brazil), including Shelley Staples’s talk, Adriana Picoral’s talk and workshop, and Larissa Goulart’s workshop.

“Adriana Picoral has extensively helped me with the procedures of processing MACAWS data,” wrote Mariana.

Jianfen Chen (Purdue)

Jianfen Chen worked as a Crow RA for summer, focusing on the Ciabatta project and assisting with grants and other projects. Her academic blog entitled “The Assemblage Rhetoric of Face Masks in COVID-19 in China” was included in the Blog Carnival 17 of Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (DRC). She has been selected as a DRC Graduate Fellow for 2020–21.

Bradley Dilger (Purdue)

Dr. Bradley Dilger concluded a four-year term as director of Introductory Composition at Purdue, and co-authored a conference presentation:

Smith, A., Bay, J., Clark, A., Mast, E., Elvir, O., Chernouski, L., & Dilger, B. (2020, July.) Teaching students to seek answers to their questions: Writing programs as incubators for undergraduate research. Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Biennial Conference, West Lafayette, IN. (Online.)

Jie Gao (Fudan University)

Dr. Jie Gao relocated to Shanghai, China to begin an appointment as Lecturer at the College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University.

Jhonatan Henao-Muñoz (Arizona)

Jhonatan Henao-Muñoz was a research assistant in two projects, one on UX Research Methods in the Department of French & Italian, and the other on Translation in the School of Government and Public Policy, at the University of Arizona.

Aleksey Novikov (Arizona)

Aleksey Novikov authored three conference presentations:

Novikov, A. (2020, July). Lexico-grammatical Development of Russian Learners. Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC). Perpignan, France (online).

Novikov, A., Picoral, A., Sommer-Farias, B., Swatek, O., Velazquez, A., & Staples, S. (2020, July). Designing Pedagogical Materials Using Interactive Data-Driven Learning with Multilingual Learner Corpora. Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC). Perpignan, France (online).

Bertho, M., Novikov, A., Picoral, A., Sommer-Farias, B., & Staples, S. (2020, May). Taking Flight with MACAWS: Learner Corpus Data from and into the Classroom. Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL). Tucson, AZ (online).

Aleksey praises Shelley Staples and Adriana Picoral for “continuing to be my mentors in most things I do.”

Emily Palese (Arizona)

Emily Palese started a new position as the Graduate Assistant Director of Global Foundations Writing, providing teacher support and developing curricula for the University of Arizona’s global microcampuses. She received the Carter Travel Award and the Graduate Center’s Professional Development Award.

Emily is nearing the end of data analysis for her dissertation and is focused on drafting and revising her research findings. She has three (of seven) chapters drafted, and partial drafts of the remaining four chapters. Despite the pandemic, she plans to defend in April 2021.

Kevin Sanchez (Arizona)

Kevin Sanchez wrote for Pine Reads Review. He writes, “I would like to shoutout Shelley Staples for being such a positive and encouraging figure who is always willing to provide useful feedback and advice.”

Hui Wang (Arizona)

Hui Wang joined the Crow team! (Welcome, Hui!) She accepted a fellowship in the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) program at University of Arizona.

Ali Yaylali (Arizona)

Ali Yaylali coordinated the Crow high school workshop group during the summer, and published a book review:

Yaylali, Ali (2020). [Review of the book Learner corpus research: New perspectives and applications, by V. Brezina & L. Flowerdew, Eds.]. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 25(2), 235-240. https://benjamins.com/catalog/ijcl.00027.yay

Ali also attended a LAEL workshop on Stanford dependency parser and some other presentations offered by LAEL. He also attended the REMOTE conference on online teaching at Arizona State University. He completed two short online courses on teaching online and online discussions. Finally, he completed two MOOC courses on Python programming (introductory and data analysis). As a service, he worked as a reviewer for AAAL 2021.