College of Education Faculty and Doctoral Students Selected to Participate in First Virtual National Conference on Applied Linguistics

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The American Association of Applied Linguistics held their first virtual conference March 19 through 23. The conference offered workshops on “Narrative Research Methods in Applied Linguistics” and “Multimodal Data Transcription and Analysis: Methodologies and Tools to Advance Your Work” including sessions on posters, papers and colloquia. An added attractive feature to the range of 1000 other “on-demand,” close-captioned recorded sessions, is the fact that these are accessible to registered attendees 24/7 during the conference and for 6 months after. Acceptance of presenters was determined after an extensive review process involving 23 strand coordinators, 646 peer reviewers, and the University of British Colombia conference organizing committee. Thus, acceptance into the program was highly competitive and determined by considering recommendations from the rigorous review process and the capacity of this virtual conference environment.

The UMass College of Education faculty and doctoral students in the department of teacher education and curriculum studies were well represented.

Theresa Austin, language, literacy and culture concentration (LLC) professor co-presented on “Ethical Issues in Planning Programs for TESOL Teachers & Learners- Examining Certificates & Study Abroad.” Austin also co-presented with Rosa Medina their paper based on Riveor's dissertation entitled “No hay que cercenar a los estudiantes: Teachers decolonizing linguistic ideologies and pedagogies in Colombia.”

Recent language, literacy and culture concentration graduate 2020, Roehl Sybing, presented on his research, “‘I just thought of this now’: A proposed methodology for observing shifts in dialogic interaction.”

Meg Gebhard, in the teacher education and school improvement concentration with visiting scholar, Heeok Jeong, presented on “Decentering whiteness and the teaching of translingual literature: SFL in the English language arts classroom.”

Junling Zhu, PhD student from the teacher education and school improvement concentration, presented her paper entitled “Critical analysis of the cultural representation in the Chinese language textbooks in the United States.”