AAAL 2023 Award Recipients

The AAAL Distinguished Public Service Award (DPSA) recognizes individuals outside of the field of applied linguistics -- writers, journalists, politicians, lawyers, etc. -- whose work (1) raises public awareness of important social issues connected to language and (2) makes exceptional contributions to promotion of multilingualism, linguistic social and justice, and language-related human rights. This year’s recipient is Lee Tonouchi. Lee is a passionate language advocate in Hawaiʻi, where he is known as “Da Pidgin Guerilla” due to his support for the use of Pidgin, the creole language of Hawaiʻi.

Lee has published five books in Pidgin which not only tell engaging, humorous, and poignant stories, but which also invite readers to deeply reflect on the role of Pidgin and its treatment in society by families, teachers, naysayers, and people in power. His first book, Da Word (2001) was a collection of his short stories, including a story about his own revelation that Pidgin is often not considered a language by many people since its words cannot be found in a (English) dictionary, an oft-cited (and misguided) source of linguistic authority.

Lee is an accomplished writer, public speaker, community activist, and educator. Above all, he is a warrior for Pidgin speakers. In Hawaiʻi, as in many creole contexts, Pidgin has been positioned as a form of “broken English” and as a language of the working class that keeps people from climbing the socioeconomic ladder. Lee has worked to challenge this deficit view of Pidgin head on, through articulating wisdom and wit in Pidgin in his writing and public engagements.

Currently, I’m a PhD Candidate in the Culture, Literacy & Language program at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Born and raised in Puerto Rico, I hold Master’s degrees in Bicultural & Bilingual Education from UTSA and Historia y Geografía de América from the Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico (UIPR). At the moment, I’m conducting an ethnography of educational language policy in the island-nation on St. Lucia sponsored by a Fulbright Open/research study. Framed on postcolonial approaches and decolonial methods, this dissertation explores the ways in which educational practitioners in St. Lucia “disorder” the colonial school by recontextualizing monolingual educational policies into bottom-up policies that employ Kwéyòl to teach and learn St. Lucian’s Creole ontologies. Additionally, the study seeks to unveil ideological negotiations between Eurocentric authoritative discourses displayed in educational language policies and Creolized persuasive discourses driving policy recontextualization.

Jazmine Exford is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at UC Santa Barbara. Her work surrounds sociocultural linguistic processes in second language learning, and it has direct implications for emergent teaching strategies that better account for identity and sociolinguistic variation.

Dylan Burton is a PhD candidate in the Second Language Studies program at Michigan State University. He holds an MA in Language Testing at Lancaster University and previously worked as an Assessment Solutions Consultant for the British Council in Beijing, China. Dylan’s research interests are in applied linguistics and language assessment, particularly in speaking assessment, rater cognition, and non-verbal behavior. His research has been published in Language Testing, Language Assessment Quarterly, Papers in Language Testing and Assessment, and System. Dylan has served as a consultant for the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, as chair of Michigan State University’s Language Testing Group, and as member of the ILTA Graduate Student Assembly. He is currently the editorial assistant for Language Testing journal, co-editor of the ILTA Bibliography of Articles and Dissertations, and co-editor of book reviews for TESL-EJ.

Mina Hernandez Garcia is earning her PhD in Educational Studies at the University of Michigan. Mina is committed to supporting bi/multilingual and immigrant students who are new to English in U.S. subject-matter classrooms. She has taught English as a foreign/second language in a variety of educational contexts, and has also worked as a teacher educator, training new teachers who work with emergent bilingual students.

Mina’s research studies translanguaging in middle school inquiry-oriented social studies classrooms. Her work offers important insights into the ways teachers can support emergent bilingual students to expand their bilingual repertoires as they develop disciplinary literacy and language. After finishing her PhD, Mina plans to become a professor, and to continue training teachers to discover their enthusiasm for teaching and to support emergent bilingual learners and other minoritized students. She hopes her work will help more students experience education as just and equitable, and help teachers create inclusive and welcoming classroom environments for all. She believes that supporting bilingual children recognizes and respects their identities and futures as multilingual citizens.

Negar Siyari is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at Georgetown University. With the help of her mother tongue in Farsi as well as her second language teaching experience, she specializes in language education for Afghan newcomers in the United States. Her doctoral dissertation investigates an action research study of a task-based curriculum of English for Afghan newcomers. In addition to being a research assistant at Georgetown, she is currently a part-time teacher of English to refugees from various backgrounds including Afghanistan, Ukraine, Haiti and Somalia.

Rachel Floyd is a doctoral candidate in the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Program at the University of Arizona. She earned her Master's in French and Bachelor of Arts in French and Psychology from the University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK). Her research interests include the adoption of multiliteracies and critical pedagogies, multilingual identities and practices, language play, and technology use in the L2 classroom. She has publications in Multifaceted Strategies for Social-Emotional Learning and Whole Learner Education and English Teaching: Practice & Critique, with one forthcoming with the FLLITE project.

Jaime F. Mejia Mayorga is an educator and English language teacher from Honduras. He is currently finishing a PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. His academic work privileges Indigenous ways and promotes social justice and transformation. He is also interested in community empowerment, Global Englishes, L2 writing, and teacher support and education.

Magdalena holds a BA degree in Spanish Philology from Warsaw University, Poland; MA degree in Latin American Studies from Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar, Ecuador; and currently is a PhD candidate in the College of Education at the Pennsylvania State University, US.
Magdalena has been an English teacher educator for over 25 years. She worked in Ecuador between 2004 and 2016 developing professional development trainings for in-service English teachers and providing educational services to public entities.
Magdalena’s PhD research intersects teacher education, language policy, and decoloniality in Latin America. She is a co-organizer and a co-editor of the series of decolonial conversations at the Global Virtual Forum (https://gvf.la.psu.edu). Additionally, Magdalena works as a TESL instructor in immersion study abroad programs in Ecuador where she engages with her undergraduate students from the Pennsylvania State University in decolonizing English language teaching in postcolonial contexts.
Magdalena is a Polish citizen, and a resident in both Ecuador and the US. She translanguages between Polish, Spanish, Kichwa, and English.

Sovicheth Boun, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of ESL & Literacy in the Department of Secondary and Higher Education, McKeown School of Education, Salem State University. He teaches a variety of teacher education courses such as Foundations for Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL), Sheltering Content for English Language Learners, Linguistics for ESL Educators, Context and Culture in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), Seminar in TESOL, and Culturally Responsive Teaching. His research interests include second/foreign language education, bi-/multilingual education, the global spread of English, language ideologies, language teacher identities, language/educational experiences of Southeast Asian American students, and critical discourse analysis. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Language, Identity and Education. He is also on the Editorial Review Boards of the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement, the International Journal of TESOL Studies, and the TESOL Communications. He is a co-editor (with Wayne E. Wright and Ofelia Garcia) of the Handbook of Bilingual and Multilingual Education.

Mel Engman is a Lecturer of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen's University Belfast and author of the article Land as Interlocutor: A Study of Ojibwe Learner Language in Interaction on and With Naturally Occurring “Materials.”.

Mary Hermes is the Director of Grassroots Indigenous Multimedia and author of the article Land as Interlocutor: A Study of Ojibwe Learner Language in Interaction on and With Naturally Occurring “Materials.”.