AAALetter - September 2015

Volume 27, Number 3

Table of Contents

1. From the President: Going Social
   AAAL has taken the social (media) turn. Finally, I might add.
   This is not to say that AAAL has not had any online presence. Tech savvy members and conference participants have already been using various forms of social media to connect with one another—before, during and after AAAL conferences. Yet, until recently, AAAL itself had not been playing an active role in facilitating interactions through the social media. Read More
   

2. Update on the 2016 AAAL Conference
   We are getting very excited about the 2016 Conference, which will take place at the Hilton Orlando Hotel from April 9 to 12. The conference chair, Kathi Baily made a site visit to the hotel in July and was very impressed with the staff and the setting as a conference venue. The proposal submission process closed at 11:59 PM, Pacific Daylight Time on Wednesday, August 19, and the reviewing of over 1,700 proposals submitted is in full swing. Read More
   

3. 2016 Pre-Conference Workshop
   We are very excited to be offering AAAL’s first preconference workshops next year in Orlando. The two all-day workshops, led by Stefan Th. Gries and Johannes Wagner, are being held on Friday, April 8, the day before the conference begins. Registration, which will start in October, is open to everyone, although space is limited. Read More
   

4. Member Spotlight: Laura Collins (1998 GSA Recipient)
   As you may recall, our June issue included a report submitted by the Fund for Applied Linguistics (FFAL) Board of Trustees about their recent survey and interviews with the past recipients of the Graduate Student Awards. Starting this issue, AAALetter will feature a member whose achievement was recognized by different awards offered by the organization. Our first member to be introduced in this column is Laura Collins from Concordia University in Montreal. Read More

5. 2015 AAAL Election Results
   Many thanks to the 2014-2015 Nominating Committee (Naoko Taguchi, Chair; Patricia Duff; Gabrielle Kasper; Keiko Koda; and Constant Leung) for recruiting a strong slate of candidates. 262 members of AAAL voted in this year’s election. The article introduces the profiles of the elected members. Read More

From the President: Going Social

AAAL has taken the social (media) turn. Finally, I might add.

This is not to say that AAAL has not had any online presence. Tech savvy members and conference participants have already been using various forms of social media to connect with one another—before, during and after AAAL conferences. The Graduate Student Council (in its current and previous iterations) has long been using Facebook and Twitter effectively to disseminate important information related to the organization. Yet, until recently, AAAL itself had not been playing an active role in facilitating interactions through the social media. Although AAAL has had Facebook and Twitter accounts for a number of years, they had not been used actively until fairly recently.

When I organized AAAL 2015 in Toronto, one of my charges was to integrate social media into the conference activities. For about a year leading up to the conference, I used the official AAAL accounts as well as my own Facebook and Twitter accounts to post relevant announcements as well as some sneak previews of the conference site and events.

Social media is not for everyone, of course. There are members and conference participants who, for various reasons, choose not to participate. In the early stage of planning, I had also heard a concern that social media use could be disruptive—if, for example, users exchanged irrelevant or offensive comments during sessions. Fortunately, AAAL 2015 participants used social media responsibly and respectfully. I felt everyone did a great job in using technology to enhance the conference experience—for themselves and for others.

As an organization serving large and divers constituencies, it is important to provide various opportunities for engagement—both for users and non-users of social media. During the conference, I used a live feed service to project the comments and photos on Twitter and Instagram. This feature made the online exchanges visible even to those who choose not to use the technology themselves. After the conference, some members used Twitter to facilitate post conference discussion, and Storify to aggregate and archive conference Tweets for others to see—including those in China who do not have direct access to many of the social media platforms popular in North America. All in all, the social media integration seemed to facilitate productive discussion—thanks to all those who participated—and I have received many positive comments from various people.

I have now passed on the official social media baton along with the conference organizer role. The AAAL accounts will be managed by the AAAL Business Office, and it is up to future conference chairs to decide how and to what extent social media will be integrated into future conferences. Regardless of the official stance by the organization, social media will probably continue to thrive at AAAL, and its use will be shaped largely by its users.

If you are new to social media and would like to learn how to use it appropriately, here are some links you might find useful:

“One Experience You're Missing Out on at Conferences” by Lily Herman

“5 Ways to Use Social Media at Conferences” by Eric Holtzclaw

“Tweeting Etiquette at Conferences” by @online_academic

I look forward to seeing you all at #aaal2016—both in person and through social media.

—Paul Kei Matsuda (@pmatsuda), Arizona State University

Update on the 2016 AAAL Conference

We are getting very excited about the 2016 Conference, which will take place at the Hilton Orlando Hotel from April 9 to 12. Kathi made a site visit to the hotel in July and was very impressed with the staff and the setting as a conference venue.

The proposal submission process closed at 11:59 PM, Pacific Daylight Time on Wednesday, August 19. There were over 1,700 proposals submitted for a combination of individual papers (1,477), colloquia (52), roundtable discussions (74), and poster sessions (101) in eighteen different thematic strands. The reviewing is now in full swing with over 300 volunteers reading proposals in a carefully structured double-blind review process. We are very grateful for the important work being done by the Strand Coordinators and proposal reviewers.

A feature we have reinstated from the 2013 and 2014 conferences is what we are calling “Professional Opportunities Sessions”, which will run during the lunch break. So far the topics to be covered include applying for funding from sources beyond one’s home institution, a session on AAAL awards, writing effective proposals for the AAAL Conference, increasing the visibility of applied linguistics, and multiple sessions on publishing. We are also planning to offer a “Newcomers’ Session” on Saturday, April 9 for first-time attendees.

The newly constituted Graduate Student Council (GSC) has planned a series of exciting events as well. On Sunday evening there will be an open meeting sponsored by the GSC Executive Committee to update conference goers on GSC activities and initiatives. It will be followed by a networking social event. On Monday afternoon there will be a professional development event focusing on the job search. For more information you can visit the GSC Facebook page at AAAL Graduate Students. We appreciate the thoughtful and enthusiastic input from the GSC leaders, particularly Nicole Pettitt and Daniel Ginsberg.

In an effort to address conference issues in a transparent and user-friendly manner, we have begun an FAQ initiative on aaal.org. The first list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) is specifically dedicated to the concerns related to submitting proposals. A second FAQ list has been added to the website regarding questions related to graduate students and their involvement with AAAL. Forthcoming will be a third FAQ list which will answer many of the questions that conference-goers may have about registering and preparing for the 2016 conference.

We look forward to seeing you in Orlando next April. In the meantime, you may send questions to conference@aaal.org and also follow us on Twitter @aaal16confteam.

—Tim Marquette, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey
— Kathleen M. Bailey, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey

2016 Pre-Conference Workshop

We are very excited to be offering AAAL’s first preconference workshops next year in Orlando. This initiative has evolved under the past several leadership teams of AAAL, with the goal of developing other forums for professional development in addition to the conference. The two all-day workshops are being held on Friday, April 8, the day before the conference begins. Registration, which will start in October, is open to everyone, although space is limited. Graduate students benefit from a lower registration rate.

The topics for the workshops were developed based on a 2014 survey of the AAAL membership and focus on research methodology.

University of California Santa Barbara professor, Stefan Th. Gries, familiarizes participants with the statistical programming language R which is increasingly used in multiple areas of applied linguistics including corpus, cognitive and computational linguistics.

Johannes Wagner, Professor of Communication at the University of Southern Denmark, leads participants in an exploration of what Conversation Analysis (CA) can reveal about the ways in which second language users deploy their conversational resources for interactional purposes.

We hope you will be able to join us for this innovative new addition to our AAAL offerings. More details regarding the workshops can be found by following the links in the text above. The opening of the registration will be announced by an email alert to the members.

—Lucy Pickering, Texas A&M University-Commerce

Member Spotlight: Laura Collins (1998 GSA Recipient)

As you may recall, our June issue included a report submitted by the Fund for Applied Linguistics (FFAL) Board of Trustees about their recent survey and interviews with the past recipients of the Graduate Student Awards. Starting this issue, AAALetter will feature a member whose achievement was recognized by different awards offered by the organization. Our first member to be introduced in this column is Laura Collins from Concordia University in Montreal.

“In 1998 I was a doctoral student and about to present my first paper at AAAL. Learning that I had been selected for one of the two Graduate Student Travel Awards that year provided some welcome support at a time when my financial resources were dwindling. As there were just two recipients of the award that year, we were given an opportunity to say a few words to the audience before accepting it. I tried to convey my gratitude to the organization for providing this support for new scholars, and said that I looked forward to being in a position one day to be able to contribute to the fund myself (a promise, I hasten to add, that I kept when I took up my first tenure track position two years later).

During the reception that followed, many scholars whose work I knew but whom I had never met, came up to congratulate me, including the President of AAAL, Mary McGroarty. My presentation was in one of the final slots on the final day, on what turned out to be a very sunny day in an often-rainy Seattle. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to find some of those same senior scholars make the effort to attend my talk. What further impressed me was their generosity following the presentation, as several offered constructive criticism on the work and advice on how to write up the study for publication. I left the conference convinced that AAAL was an organization I valued, and that I wanted to be part of.

Since that time I have served as local chair for the conference twice (Vancouver, 2000 and Montreal, 2006), strand coordinator, panel participant for professional workshops on publishing and abstract writing, and more recently as a member of the AAAL Executive Committee. Among the Executive Committee members during my term was the other recipient of the Award in 1999, Paul Kei Matsuda! I have also attended and presented at every AAAL conference since 1998, often initiating graduate students from my own institution to AAAL, many of whom have served as volunteers. A few have also been recipients of the Award themselves.

So, when asked to reflect on what the award has meant for my career as an academic, I would say that it introduced me to and gave me visibility in an organization that truly mentored me into the field. A particularly valuable aspect of the mentoring has been the models of behavior for encouraging new scholars in their own research endeavors. From personal experience, then, I applaud AAAL for the FFAL initiative, especially in light of the recent growth in student membership and involvement in the organization.”

To support our graduate student travel awards with a donation to the FFAL, please visit http://www.aaal.org/?page=FFAL.

2015 AAAL Election Results

Many thanks to the 2014-2015 Nominating Committee (Naoko Taguchi, Chair; Patricia Duff;
Gabrielle Kasper; Keiko Koda; and Constant Leung) for recruiting a strong slate of candidates. 262 members of AAAL voted in this year’s election.

Linda Harklau was elected Second Vice President. Linda is Professor in the TESOL and World Language Education Program and in the Linguistics Program at the University of Georgia. Over the past 20 years her research has examined factors affecting second language learning and academic achievement of immigrant youth in high school and college. A recipient of the TESOL Distinguished Research Award, she has served on the editorial boards of Anthropology and Education Quarterly, TESOL Journal, TESOL Quarterly, and Reading Research Quarterly. She served as Member at Large of AAAL from 2004-2007 and as Secretary/Treasurer from 2009-2013, and currently serves on the Board of Trustees for the Center for Applied Linguistics.

Steven Thorne was elected Member at Large. He is Associate Professor of Second Language Acquisition in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Portland State University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Groningen. His research utilizes cultural-historical, usage-based, distributed, and critical approaches to language development, often with a focus on human interactivity in technology-culture contexts. He has previously served on, and chaired, the AAAL Nominating Committee.

Jodi Crandall was elected Trustee of the Fund for the Future of Applied Linguistics. She is Professor Emerita of Education at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she co-directed the MA TESOL Program and founded and directed the PhD Program in Language, Literacy and Culture. Her research interests include the integration of language and content instruction, language teacher education, professional development of language teachers and other teachers working in linguistically diverse contexts, and curriculum and materials development. She has served as President of AAAL, TESOL, and WATESOL, the Washington, DC, TESOL affiliate. She was a founding member and former Secretary/Treasurer of The International Research Foundation for English Language Education (TIRF) and is the incoming Chair of the Center for Applied Linguistics Board of Trustees.

Linda, Steve and Jodi’s terms will begin at the 2016 Conference in Orlando.

AAAL members also elected four new members of the Nominating Committee, to join chair Keiko Koda in recruiting next year’s slate of nominees:

Ryuko Kubota is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on critical approaches to applied linguistics by drawing various inquiry approaches from cultural studies, multiculturalism, critical race theory, and critical pedagogy. She has previously served on the AAAL Executive Committee as Member at Large and chaired the Nominating Committee.

Charlene Polio is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Linguistics & Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages at Michigan State University. She is also a Co-Director of MSU’s federally funded Title VI Center for Language Education and Research. Her research focuses on research methods in second language writing and the interface between second language writing and second language acquisition research. She is the past editor of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics and the current Co-Editor of the Modern Language Journal, and has served on the editorial boards of TESOL Quarterly and the Journal of Second Language Writing. She has served on the AAAL Nominating Committee and as the AAAL Newsletter Editor.

Fredricka L. Stoller is Professor of English at Northern Arizona University, where she teaches in the MA-TESL and PhD in Applied Linguistics programs. Her research interests include L2 reading, disciplinary writing, content-based instruction, project-based learning, and curriculum design. She served as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Turkey and a Fulbright Specialist at the National University of Timor-Leste. She has trained ESL/EFL teachers and teacher trainers in 30 countries.

Guadalupe Valdés is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford University. Much of her work has focused on the English-Spanish bilingualism of Latinos in the United States and on discovering and describing how two languages are developed, used, and maintained by individuals who become bilingual in immigrant communities. Valdés is a member of the American Academy of Education, a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and a member of the Board of Trustees of Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the Center for Applied Linguistics. She serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals including Modern Language Journal, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, and Research on the Teaching of English.

Peter De Costa and Steven Talmy were elected to the Best Book Award Committee.

Peter De Costa is Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages at Michigan State University. His research examines the role of identity and ideology in language learning in multilingual settings; qualitative research methodology and ethics in applied linguistics; English as a lingua franca; and sociocultural approaches to second language learning research more generally.

Steven Talmy is Associate Professor in the Department of Language & Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, where he is involved in both graduate education and K-12 teacher education/certification. His research has focused on K-12 English language learning, integrating close analyses of classroom interaction, interview talk, and critical ethnography to examine classroom resistance, linguicism, language ideologies about ESL, and the stigma of ESL as a social identity category.

Diane Belcher and Karen Johnson were elected to the Best Dissertation Award Committee.

Diane D. Belcher is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Applied Linguistics and ESL at Georgia State University. Her research interests include advanced academic literacy, language for specific purposes, cultural identity, and qualitative research methodology.

Karen E. Johnson is Kirby Professor in Language Learning and Applied Linguistics in the Department of Applied Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on teacher learning in L2 teacher education, sociocultural perspectives on L2 teacher development, and narrative inquiry as professional development.

Robert DeKeyser and Sandra McKay were elected to the first Best Article Award Committee.

Robert DeKeyser is Professor of Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research interests include a range of topics in the psycholinguistics of SLA as well as instructed second language learning: the roles of implicit and explicit learning, practice and automatization processes, corrective feedback, language learning aptitude, age effects in second language learning, and study abroad.

Sandra McKay is Professor Emeritus of San Francisco State University. Her main areas of interest are sociolinguistics, English as an International Language, and second language pedagogy. She served as TESOL Quarterly Editor from 1994 to 1999 and has served on the editorial advisory board for the Journal of Second Language Writing and the TESOL Quarterly.

AAAL relies on the service and participation of its members. Many thanks to those who were elected, those who agreed to run, and those who voted.

—Jeff Conner-Linton, Georgetown University