Applied Linguistics Department

Recently, doctoral candidate of Applied Linguistics Vannessa Quintana Sarria had the privilege of attending a conference ISCAR held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, from 27 – 30 August 2024 centered around the theme of “Inclusiveness as a Future Challenge.” The event brought together researchers and practitioners from various fields to discuss the importance of diversity and cultural-historical perspectives in addressing contemporary issues. Vannessa reflects about the event: “As a multilingual English teacher, I was particularly interested in the potential of CHAT to inform my practice.”

Also, Vannessa shared her key takeaways for those who are thinking about attending this conference and being part of CHAT theory.

One of the highlights of the conference was the opportunity to explore the intersection of CHAT and developmental education. The Netherlands has a long history of research in this area, and the conference provided valuable insights into the ways in which theory and practice can be aligned to create meaningful learning experiences for diverse student populations.

My own presentation, titled “Multilingual English Language Teaching: Challenges and Possibilities in the Secondary Classroom,” focused on the results of my dissertation research. I discussed the tensions that multilingual English teachers face in SEI secondary programs and the contradictions that emerge in different discursive moments. The presentation was well-attended, and I had the opportunity to engage in stimulating discussions with colleagues from around the world.

Overall, the conference was a valuable experience that has deepened my understanding of the role of diversity and cultural-historical perspectives in education. As a multilingual English teacher, I am committed to using CHAT to inform my practice and create inclusive learning environments for all students.

The Office of Graduate Studies, McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, the College of Liberal Arts, the College of Education and Human Development, and the College of Science and Mathematics are pleased to announce the 2024 cohort of the UMass Boston Transdisciplinary Dissertation Proposal Development Program (TDPD) Summer Institute. Doctoral students of the Applied Linguistics Department Jacqueline Campo and Wonguk Cho have been selected to participate in the program among a large and highly competitive pool of candidates from across the University.

Jacqueline Campo (Applied Linguistics, College of Liberal Arts). Topic: the experiences, identities, language practices, and educational trajectories of Quechua people.

Wonguk Cho (Applied Linguistics, College of Liberal Arts). Topic: relationship between language policies and language practices nationally and within families related to a recent growth in immigration of temporary workers to South Korea.

Using inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, the Summer Institute helps students develop competitive proposals for external funding, increases their support networks, and provides career development guidance. Following the Summer Institute, students receive $3000 in summer research funds to support their dissertation proposal development. The first part of the Summer Institute will take place June 11 – 15; the second part will take place September 13 – 15. During the summer, students will conduct preliminary research to support their proposal development. Professor Rosalyn Negrón (Anthropology) and Professor Elizabeth Sweet (Anthropology) will be this year’s faculty facilitators.

The Department of Applied Linguistics has been having doctoral students in TDPD for many years and continues this tradition. Among alumni of TDPD are Aram Ahmed, Tianxuan Wang, Nasiba Norova, Vannessa Quintana Sarria, and Iuliia Fakhrutdinova.

Dr. Carhill-Poza, recent alumna Jesse Rubio, and doctoral students Vannessa Quintana Sarria and Aram Ahmed of the Department of Applied Linguistics presented their one-hour-colloquium Symbolic Multilingualism and Linguistic Justice: Teacher Perspectives on Language Policy at the American Association of Applied Linguistics 2024 in Houston, Texas on March 18. This colloquium presented three perspectives on language policy and classroom practice for multilingual students (classified in public schools as English learners) and their teachers in contexts of rapid change. The projects address the possibilities and obstacles teachers of multilingual students encounter as they interpret and implement evolving language policy while at the same time responding to the unprecedented challenges of longstanding educational inequities exacerbated by the pandemic, teacher shortage, and social unrest in the United States.  

Their conversation began by deconstructing official policies governing the education of students classified as English learners in Massachusetts, where recent policy change has supported the expansion of multilingual programs. The paper identified how official language and education policies operate across the state, district, school, and classroom level to shape teachers’ understanding of multilingual students’ experiences and possible futures.   

Second, they explored classroom practices that support linguistic justice and equitable educational access for multilingual students and how such practices connect to teachers’ identities, beliefs and educational journeys. The paper also addressed the obstacles that in-service multilingual English teachers face in mainstream education and their recommendations for overcoming them.  

In the third paper, they concluded with a paper focused on teacher talk in two ESL classes at the college level. The paper employs stimulated recall to investigate student perceptions and attitudes towards teacher talk; it reveals how students make sense of teacher talk, their teacher’s pedagogical choices, and their participation in class discussions and activities.  

Finally, the discussion followed the papers presented in thinking about teachers as language policy makers and bringing together the perspectives from each project.  

The Department of Applied Linguistics is proud to announce that Ghadah Noorelahi successfully defended her dissertation “Promoting Saudi Learners’ Coherence and Cohesion Writing Development Using Dynamic Assessment – An Approach for IELTS Preparation” on March 20th.

Dissertation Committee: Kimberly Urbanski (Chair), Panayota Gounari, and Rebekha Abbuhl

Abstract: A well-documented gap exists in pedagogical approaches for teaching L2 coherence and cohesion writing skills, particularly in high-stakes testing contexts. Prior research on coherence and cohesion has been non-developmental as it has not tracked learners’ progress over time. In order to fill this gap, this study employed a robust instructional approach to promote the development of learners’ coherence and cohesion writing skills. Underpinned by Sociocultural Theory (SCT), this study bridges the gap between test preparation and actual language development through implementing a Dynamic Assessment (DA) approach into the context of IELTS. This dissertation investigated how four Saudi L2 English learners developed their coherence and cohesion writing skills, specifically for the IELTS Academic Writing Task 2, through seven online DA sessions over Google Docs. The DA procedure incorporated a genre process approach to writing which helped learners identify the genres of the IELTS Academic Writing Task 2, recognize their rhetorical purposes and incorporate textual organizational stages to develop their coherence writing skills. Additionally, it emphasized accurately integrating cohesion concepts into learners’ texts to develop their cohesion writing skills. Development was promoted through the use of specific mediational moves that were attuned to each participant’s needs. The written interactions between the researcher-mediator and participants were saved on Google Docs and analyzed using microgenetic analysis to track learners’ developmental trajectories. The findings suggest that the DA sessions not only promoted the participants’ coherence and cohesion development but also their independent application of the developed writing skills in delayed and more challenging transfer tasks.

Dr. Jeff Reaser was invited as a guest speaker to the Department of Applied Linguistics on April 8th, 2024. Presenting on “The Language and Life Project at NC State: Fusing Scholarship with Linguistic Outreach,” he elaborated on his team’s endeavors. Throughout his talk, he explored diverse regional dialects within North Carolina, illustrating their role in shaping a vibrant linguistic environment within the community. Additionally, he conducted a screening of the documentary “Talking Black in America.” The abstract of Dr. Jeff Reaser’s presentation is as follows:

Abstract: North Carolinians are fiercely proud of a lot of things, including their rich history, diverse culturally distinct regions, barbeque, landmarks, etc. But one cultural trait they tend to be a little embarrassed about is their dialects: They like how they speak, but they know that others judge them for it. North Carolinians are not unique in their complicated feelings about their speech. For over a half-century, linguists have held firm that no dialect is linguistically better or worse than any other dialect. Unfortunately, this message has not permeated public discourse about language diversity. This lack of success does not mean linguists should abandon the principles of error correction and linguistic gratuity. In fact, it suggests we ought to do more to engage the public. This outreach work is essential, as attitudes about language variation affect many areas of life, including housing, education, policing, criminal justice, and more. For over three decades, the Language and Life Project (LLP) at NC State has done academic research across and beyond North Carolina, amassing over 4000 sociolinguistic interviews that have led to hundreds of academic articles and books. However, unlike many other academic programs, our mission has always been to use that research in ways that improve the lives of the people who were generous enough to talk to us. The LLP has sought to operationalize linguistic gratuity in ways that benefit communities. Over the years, these projects have taken many forms, including oral history projects, video documentaries, museum exhibits, popular audience books, and websites. We have now extended our outreach work to other venues, including film festivals, the North Carolina State Fair, continuing education workshops for teachers, and a statewide dialect awareness curriculum for 8th graders. The goal of this work is to transform North Carolinians’ linguistic insecurity by celebrating all forms of language spoken in the Tar Heel state. This talk shares the lessons learned from thirty years of celebrating language and life with diverse communities and shares examples of the work extending form these collaborations, including the most recent documentary, the Emmy-winning Talking Black in America series.

Jacqueline Campo is a Quechua second-year PhD student in Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Boston has recently received an Indigenous Language Scholarship Support Fund by the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) for her research Confronting Lived Language Ideologies: Learning Quechua as a Heritage Language. This fund is used to support indigenous scholars to present and participate in the conference. Jacqueline Campo is the first scholar in our department to receive such an outstanding award from AAAL. She also holds an MA in Applied Linguistics with a concentration in bilingual education and foreign language pedagogy and a BA in Linguistics at the National University of San Marcos, Peru. Her research interests are language navigation in relation to indigenous identities in urban and immigrant spaces.

Congratulations Jacqueline!

Ph.D. Candidate Julia Donnelly Spiegelman was presented a Graduate Student Award by the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) for her research investigating the language learning experiences of gender nonbinary students in U.S. high schools. At the recent AAAL conference in Houston, Texas, Julia presented her paper entitled “‘Gender? I hardly know ‘er!’: Insights into linguistic agency from nonbinary adolescent learners of Spanish.” The Graduate Student Awards are awarded annually to students whose research promises to make a significant contribution to the field.

Julia also recently published two articles related to this research. “‘The pronouns EXIST!’: Linguistic existence in the borderlands as a U.S. non-binary heritage learner of Spanish” recently appeared in a Special Issue of Critical Multilingualism Studies on “pluriversalizing” Spanish language education.

“Queer breaches and normative devices: language learners queering gender, sexuality, and the L2 classroom,” co-authored with Ashley Moore, James Coda, and Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, was recently published in a Special Issue of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism on the theme of “Queering Multilingualism.

On March 27th, 2024, Abdelkrim Mouhib successfully defended his dissertation. His work, titled Understanding Superdiversity Through Linguistic Landscape in the City of Rabat, Morocco, presented multimodal data and his interpretations. By employing the Linguistic Landscape framework, he demonstrated how a relatively underrepresented area in the Global South has fostered a unique linguistic perspective of the city, which has underprivileged groups.
The dissertation committee was chaired by Christian Chun, with Jennifer Sclafani and Said Bennis as members.

Abstract: This dissertation investigated the sociolinguistic superdiversity in Rabat, the capital city of Morocco. Superdiversity is a completely different form of diversity that was never seen before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For the past two decades, urban centers in the West have been experiencing an unprecedented influx of immigrants; as a result, these centers have become superdiverse and complex. Even though no study of superdiversity was conducted in Morocco before, I argue that this new form of superdiversity is already taking place in several urban cities including Rabat. The study, which follows the new trend of research that uses LL and ethnography as tools to investigate superdiversity in urban areas, took place in Fal Ould Oumeir, which is the busiest avenue in Agdal neighborhood and one of the richest areas of the city. Data collection was conducted during the summer semester of 2021 and the winter semester of 2022. On one hand, this study contributes to the field of LL studies which is relatively new even in Western sociolinguistics. On the other hand, it is the first study of its kind to be conducted in Morocco that will hopefully pave the way to more research in this underrepresented region. The data analysis reveals two major findings. First, it provides evidence that super-diversity is also a reality in urban areas of the Global South. Second, it shows how conviviality excludes Moroccans of limited income and sub-Saharan migrants as underprivileged groups existing in urban Rabat.

The Applied Linguistics Department is having an extremely productive spring: presenting and attending conferences such as AAAL 2024, TESOL 2024, and AERA 2024 and inviting guest speakers to UMass Boston. Part of this initiative was a talk and a workshop by Prof. Tricia Kress from Molloy College on “Research as Epistemology: Tapping into Multiple Ways of Knowing with Innovative Methods” where she discussed qualitative methodological approaches to research and shared projects she has conducted or overseen.

Prof. Kress started her workshop by making space to know each other and having conversations of Critical Pedagogy & Postformalism for Authentic Inquiry and demystifying the myth of positivism. After her presentation, the doctoral students of the Applied Linguistics department were immersed in expanding knowledge through embodied experience where Prof. Kress invited us to explore three experiences that included the excerpts of her research articles, music, artwork, books, and meaningful objects such as cicadas, Pink Floyd T-shirt, prisms, grading books, and pictures from her jogging trail. Having experienced this workshop helped us to see how critical pedagogy and epistemology can have and should have multiple ways of knowing with Innovative Methods where we step away from the positivist paradigm. By the end of the workshop, all of us reflected on our learning experiences and had fruitful discussions on how academic and research work can support a change in the world.

Dr. Jennifer Sclafani has received a Policy Across Disciplines Award from the John W. McCormack School for Policy and Global Studies and the College of Liberal Arts at UMass Boston to engage in interdisciplinary research with colleague Dr. Peter Federman, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Public Affairs. The $10,000 grant will fund their research project, “Investigating Policy Discourse and Dialogue: Housing Insecurity and Substance Abuse at the (Literal) Intersection of Mass and Cass.”In this project, Sclafani and Federman will incorporate critical sociolinguistic and public policy perspectives to examine how public discourse informs policy implementation and outcomes related to Boston’s housing and public health crises, with an eye toward illuminating effective ways to strategically communicate urban policy initiatives in response to these problems. The ultimate goal of their project is to improve policy making practices not only in local government, but in cities across the US with populations undergoing similar hardships related to mental health, substance use, and lack of housing.