AAAL 2022 Award Recipients

Alison Mackey is Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University where she is currently Department Chair. She carries out research at Lancaster University in the UK as a professor during the summers. She is also a curriculum board member at Age of Learning, a leading children’s education technology provider. Her interests focus on how languages are learned and how they might best be taught, along with research methodology of all kinds. She has authored more than 100 articles, chapters and reports and has published 18 books.  She has been a language instructor, given workshops for teachers and teacher-trainers, and taught linguistics in the U.K., Japan, Australia, Spain, and the U.S.  She is currently Editor-in-Chief of Cambridge University Press's Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, an official journal of the American Association for Applied Linguistics. Her recent awards include the MLA’s Mildenburger book prize (with Susan M. Gass), and Georgetown’s President’s Teacher-Scholar prize and Provost’s Career Research Award.

Emile YX? (Emile Jansen) was born in Grassy Park, Cape Town. He is the son of a primary school teacher Mom and soccer coach Dad. Emile is thus a proponent of experiential education and is also a qualified teacher. He is often considered to be one of the Pioneers of South African Hip Hop and is a founder member of the legendary South African Hip Hop Group, Black Noise. He is best known for developmental work and community outreach projects through Heal the Hood Project. 

Click here to view our 2022 DPSA Award Presentation.

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Zhongfeng Tian is an Assistant Professor of TESOL/Applied Linguistics in the Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Boston College. He was a former English and Mandarin teacher in China, Cambodia, and U.S. Informed by his multilingual background and transnational teaching experience, Dr. Tian’s research centers on developing equity-oriented pedagogies to advance cultural and linguistic pluralism and justice in K-12 bilingual classrooms and beyond. Theoretically, his research is grounded in perspectives of translanguaging and culturally sustaining pedagogies, aiming to provide bi/multilingual students with heterogeneous and inclusive learning environment in ESL and dual language bilingual education contexts. Methodologically, he conducts qualitative inquiry and adopts participatory design research to work closely with pre- and in-service teachers in an equitable manner to co-design and implement critical pedagogies in various classroom contexts.

 

Dr. Tian has published articles in TESOL Quarterly, System, Applied Linguistics Review, and Language and Education. He has also co-edited two special issues: one featuring “Culturally Sustaining Approaches to Academic Languaging through Systemic Functional Linguistics” (Language and Education, 2021) and the other on “Positive Synergies: Translanguaging and Critical Theories in Education” (Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, 2019) and two books: “Envisioning TESOL through a Translanguaging Lens: Global Perspectives” (Springer, 2020) and “English-Medium Instruction and Translanguaging” (Multilingual Matters, 2021).

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Olumide Ajayi is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of Georgia. He has taught the English Language in Nigeria, Yoruba Language in the U.S. as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, and currently teaches preservice world language educators at the University of Georgia. His work spans African Studies and Applied Linguistics, addressing language education policies and practices in the Nigerian context. His current research focuses on African immigrant high school students’ experiences with ESOL program delivery models in the state of Georgia. His work represents a unique and needed voice in the field of Applied Linguistics, where African perspectives and experiences are sorely under-represented. He serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Language and Literacy Education and recently chaired the Journal of Language and Literacy Education Spring 2022 conference.

Elizabeth Huntley is a doctoral candidate in Second Language Studies at Michigan State University. Her research interests include K-16 foreign language curricular articulation, psycholinguistic approaches to second language acquisition, and open science practices. In her dissertation, Huntley uses psycholinguistic measures to explore how Arabic, particularly as a diglossic language, is cognitively processed by second language learners. She has also served as editorial assistant for the journal Studies in Second Language Acquisition for four years. Beyond research, Huntley is the co-author of two recent textbooks for students of Arabic: ‘Arabiyyaat al-Naas fii MaSr, and ‘Arabiyyaat al-Naas Part II. She has taught Arabic as a second language in both high school and college programs since 2006, including the University of Michigan and Cornell University. Huntley holds master’s degrees in Middle Eastern and North African Studies, as well as in Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language, from the University of Michigan. Please visit her website to learn more.

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Harini Rajagopal (she/her) recently completed her PhD in Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She is grateful to currently live and work on the traditional, unceded, ancestral territories of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm people. Her research interests include languages and literacies in the early and elementary years, multiliteracies, translanguaging, critical literacies and pedagogies, childhood studies, and teacher education. In her dissertation, rooted in antiracist and decolonizing perspectives, she collaborated with young emergent bilinguals and their classroom teacher to include multiple languages and arts-based communicative repertoires into their mainstream classroom while paying attention to the realities of class, cultural, and systemic inequities. 

She has taught in UBC Teacher Education and community education spaces for many years, and enjoys working on collaborative and creative pedagogical designs to listen to children’s stories. Harini is being raised – and always inspired – by her two lovely young children, and supported by her partner. She loves reading, cooking, gardening, and music, and is working on her teleportation skills to bridge multiple worlds.

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Tom Avery is a PhD candidate at the University of Bath, UK. He is currently writing up his thesis after a year-long ethnography spent observing how refugee-background children experience language education in a highly deprived UK school. His work is rooted in the field of Language Policy and Planning and tries to engage with the mess of discourses which make up language ideologies. In the UK context, this include ideas of nationalism, the interplay of race, migration, and class, and the role that standard English has played in perpetuating these discourses in the social imagination. He has found recent work on raciolinguistics particularly useful in pinpointing and describing modern racism in the UK context.

He has a background in teaching English (EFL), having been an English teacher in schools and on TV in South Korea for eight years, but he now lives in the heart of the British countryside in Wiltshire. He recently spends most of his time writing, worrying about what he’s written, and trying (and failing) to communicate intelligently and sensitively about difficult ideas on Twitter. He also tries to teach himself a bit of guitar, loses at board games to his 8-year-old son, and unashamedly shares his generation’s love for avocado on toast.

Megan Heise is a doctoral candidate in the English Composition and Applied Linguistics program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She teaches first year writing at Carnegie Mellon University with a custom course design titled, “Crossing Borders: Forced Migration and Transnationalism in the 21st Century,” highlighting work by BIPOC refugee and immigrant writers. Megan’s work has focused on amplifying the voices of young refugees since 2017, when she facilitated creative projects in a refugee camp in Greece for 5 months. She’s continued this work and research through her involvement with the Pittsburgh-based Alliance for Refugee Youth Support and Education’s summer PRYSE Academy, merging English language learning with creative expression and leadership development. As an inaugural Coalition for Community Writing and Herstory Fellow last year, she also created and led an online writing workshop with the Youth Advisory Board of the international NGO Youth UnMuted, all young women with refugee experiences resettled in Germany. Her in-progress dissertation focuses on transmodal zine-making with refugee youth in Pittsburgh in partnership with the 2022 PRYSE Academy. Megan also works as a Writing Assessment Specialist for OnRamps with the University of Texas, Austin, and recently served as a co-editor for Writing Spaces, volume 4. Her work has appeared in Inspiring Pedagogical Connections and is forthcoming in the edited collection, Professionalizing Multimodal Composition. She has also presented her scholarship at conferences around the world, including the Conference on Community Writing, Conference on College Composition and Communication, and TESOL Convention, in addition to AAAL.

Ben Calman’s research explores the intersections of language and race . His master’s thesis focused on the experiences of inclusion and discrimination among plurilingual international students at a Canadian university. Through this research, Ben developed a taxonomy of raciolinguistic microaggressions to better understand how ideologies rooted in racism and linguicism co-construct and re-enforce each other. He has also shed light on how plurilingual international students forge an inclusive plurilingual-international community through plurilingual practices and their plurilingual and pluricultural competence (PPC). Ben looks forward to continuing in this vein of research while shifting the focus onto perpetrators of discrimination to develop better understanding of the biases and ideologies at the root of raciolinguistic discrimination.

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Jing Yu is a PhD candidate in Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at University of California Santa Barbara. She received M.A. in Teaching and Learning from the Ohio State University in 2015. Her research interests include international student mobility, intersections of race, class, and nationality, as well as international dimensions of equity and social justice. Her dissertation is to bring critical and decolonized perspectives to the study of international education, with a particular focus on the issues of international student experience with race and racism. Her work was published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Journal of International Students and International Journal of Chinese Education. She serves on editorial boards for Journal of College Student Development and Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice. Email: jing02@ucsb.edu.

Masaru Yamamoto is a PhD student in the Department of Language and Literacy Education (LLED) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada. His scholarly interests and professional commitments revolve around the intersection of second language socialization, academic discourse socialization, multimodality, and roles of other semiotic resources that work together in shaping multilingual students’ communicative practices and linguistic, sociocultural, and academic development in postsecondary educational settings. For him, these perspectives constitute a robust theoretical lens and means of praxis for equitable, inclusive, and asset-oriented research and pedagogy. Beyond academic commitments, motivated by the desire to improve the educational circumstances of multilingual students and their teachers and instructors, Masaru actively engages in knowledge mobilization and digital materials development in close interdisciplinary collaboration with his UBC and international collaborators. Masaru also served as a Conference Organizing Team member for the AAAL 2021 Virtual Conference.

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Raul Lejano is Professor of Environmental Education at New York University. His research combines theory on human-nonhuman relationships with fieldwork on marginality and resilience vis-a-vis climate change and extreme weather. He has developed a theory of relationality, which posits that connectedness engenders empathy, which in turn is needed to solve collective action problems, as described in his forthcoming book, Empathy and the Commons: A Relational Theory of Collective Action (Cambridge). But institutions in society hinder relationality, as argued in his co-authored book with Shondel Nero, The Power of Narrative: Climate Skepticism and the Deconstruction of Science (Oxford). This is part of his broader focus on environmental justice. Recent work in the field involves collaboration with NGOs and agencies around disaster resilience in sites that include the Rohingya refugee camp and several coastal districts in Southern Bangladesh. Another forthcoming book, co-authored with Wing Kan, applies the relational lens to policy analysis and is entitled Relationality: The Inner Life of Public Policy (Cambridge).

Shondel Nero is Professor of Language Education at New York University. A native of Guyana and transnational scholar, Dr. Nero has researched and published widely on the linguistic and educational needs of speakers of Caribbean Creole English in the US and the Caribbean, as well as on language and identity, and language education policy. She is a Fulbright scholar, and inaugural recipient of the James. E. Alatis Prize for her research on Language Education Policy implementation in Jamaican schools. Her co-authored book with Raul Lejano, The power of narrative: Climate skepticism and the deconstruction of science (Oxford UP, 2020) employs the intersection of narrative and critical discourse analyses to show the power of language in shaping narratives over time. Dr. Nero is currently working on an autoethnographic book on language, identity, and education from a transnational perspective (to be published by Multilingual Matters). She directs an annual study-abroad program in the Dominican Republic as a means of developing teachers' intercultural competence and culturally responsive pedagogy, and serves as a Board of Trustees member of the Center for Applied Linguistics.

Francisco Lorenzo is a full professor at Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain). He has held visiting scholar positions at Harvard University, University of London, and University of Jyväskylä. His research focuses on the study of second language acquisition and bilingualism, sociolinguistics, sociology of language, and European language policies. He has authored publications in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Language Policy, System, and Language and Education. He also acts as an advisor to the Andalusian Regional Department of Education, the Spanish Ministry of Education, and the Language Policy Division of the European Commission.

Brittany Parham is a fourth year PhD student in the Applied Linguistics program at the University of Oregon (UO). She received her Bachelors in Linguistics and Masters in Language Teaching Studies, both of which focused on language learning, documentation, and revitalization. She has been working in Oregon with Sahaptin/Ichishkíin languages since 2014, where she began learning the Yakima Ichishkíin language at the UO. Her previous research includes a description of the stress pattern of Warm Springs Ichishkíin, a phonetic illustration of Warm Springs Ichishkíin, and language materials for teaching requests in Yakima Ichishkíin. She has also worked at the Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI) as a project volunteer and editor, office manager and NILI Summer Institute coordinator. She was also one of the informal editors of The Gift of Knowledge: Ttnúwit Átawish Nchʼinchʼimamí: Reflections on Sahaptin Ways by first-language speaker and scholar of Yakima Ichishkíin, Dr. Virginia Beavert. Her current doctoral research focuses primarily on the intersection between pragmatics and language revitalization, specifically on teaching pragmatic functions in Yakima Ichishkíin. Her hobbies include finishing grad school, yoga, gardening, and hiking with her dog Polly and partner Brody.

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Emre Başok is a Ph.D. candidate at The Ohio State University in the Multilingual Language Education program. As a critical applied linguist, his research interests lay in language policy and planning, the seal of biliteracy (SoBL), sociolinguistics, and heritage language maintenance. Through his research, he strives to advance social and educational justice by disrupting the systematic injustices and inequities that minorities and multilingual learners face. His research on language ideologies and language policy has been informed by his background as a member of an ethnic and linguistic minority group (Circassian) in Turkey whose linguistic rights were systematically oppressed by the Turkish state through assimilationist language policies. His published research explored the language policies and their implementation by classroom teachers in Turkey, assimilationist language ideologies and their translation into fiscal policies in the U.S., the impacts of Turkey’s oppressive language policies on the generational transfer and maintenance of Circassian, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the core practices of world language teaching in the U.S. Guided theoretically and methodologically by the ethnography of language policy and neoliberal language ideologies, his dissertation explores Ohio’s SoBL implementation from equity and access perspectives which was awarded the 2021 TIRF Doctoral Dissertation Grant and the Ohio State University’s Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and Scholarship. 

I am a multilingual, multicultural individual who grew up in Halle, East Germany, for part of her life, learning Russian and English as an L2 and L3.

I have had opportunities to live abroad (Russia, Lithuania, various states within the U.S., Chile) and travel to multiple destinations after the collapse of the Wall.

Apart from wanting to kindle the passion of world languages in my students, I have also been focusing my research on Native American English language learners, the impact of intergenerational trauma, and their invisibility in the TESOL world.

Apart from being a first-year graduate student in a M.Ed. in Teaching and Learning World Languages (German, Spanish) and in a Graduate Certificate program in TESOL, I also divide my time between raising three children, being a graduate research assistant at the University of Southern Maine in the Literacy, Language, and Culture department, and working at Trader Joe’s.

Kelly Baur is a documentary filmmaker and community organizer who dreams of a future with no police and no borders.  She is currently pursuing a PhD in Linguistics/Applied Linguistics at Arizona State University.  Her research focuses on supporting the language revitalization efforts of Indigenous Mapuche communities in Chile with whom she has been collaborating since 2013

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Almaz Wasse received a PhD in Linguistics from Addis Ababa University in 2017. During her study, she was a recipient of a scholarship from a project "Linguistic Capacity Building for Inclusive Development of Ethiopia" and went to University of Oslo to take PhD courses and attend conferences. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Kotebe Metropolitan University and teaches Linguistics and English language courses and advises students at undergraduate and post graduate programmes. In addition to teaching and advising, she works as director of education quality enhancement and assurance office of the University. Her research interests include language use, language attitude, multilignualism, language of education, language policy and standardisation and second language learning. She has published four articles (one in collaboration with other colleagues) and is actively engaged in doing research in Sociolinguistics aspects of the Gamo language (An Afro-Asiatic Omotic language in South West Ethiopia).