Applied Linguistics Department

The Applied Linguistics Department at Umass Boston hosted The Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning Research Working Group Meeting 2023 from October 11 to October 13. The Sociocultural Theory Second Language Learning Working Group includes scholars from all over the world who are interested in Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory and second language learning. Every year this group of outstanding scholars, researchers, and graduate students gather to discuss new perspectives on the theory and present their work in progress in order to receive feedback from their peers.

Many doctoral students presented their work at the SCT Conference 2023. On the first day, Tina Randall doctoral student and Kimberly Urbanski Associate Professor presented their work Inclusivity and Spanish as a Heritage Language Learner Subjectivities: Perezhivanie in the SFL Classroom. The next day, Ghadah Noorelahi doctoral student presented Promoting Saudi Learners’ Coherence and Cohesion Writing Development Using Dynamic Assessment: An Approach for IELTS Preparation. Finally, Minh Nghĩa-Nguyễn presented part of her dissertation When Emotion Prevails: Storytelling Literacy Development of Vietnamese-English Emergent Bilingual Adults. Congratulations!

The Applied Linguistics Department was honored to be selected as a host this year. Kimberly Urbanski Associate Professor and Corinne Etienne Department Chairman together with the group of doctoral students Aram Ahmed, Jacqui Campo, Iuliia Fakhrutdinova, Ghadah Noorelahi, Minh Nghia Nguyen, Nasiba Norova, Tina Randall, and Vannessa Quintana Sarria organized the conference that attracted scholars from all over the United States, Spain, Finland, Brazil, and many others. Such prominent scholars of the Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory as Jim Lantolf, Kyoko Masuda, Ben White, Marília Mendes Ferreira, and Steve McCafferty opened the conference with an SCT Panel Discussion on AI and Chat GPT use in Second Language. Apart from fruitful discussions and debates, this year SCT Working Group was lucky to see the reading of the play Talking Matters by Marina Engelking and Merrill Swain. Our professors Kimberly Urbanski Associate Professor, Corinne Etienne Department Chairman, and doctoral student Vannessa Quintana Sarria tried new roles as actors.

Ph.D. candidate Vanessa Quintana Sarria, from the Department of Applied Linguistics, gave a presentation at Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia (UPTC) on October 6th 2023 and share preliminary results of my dissertation. The talk is called: Translanguaging in the English Mainstream Classroom: Discovering the Academic Power of Multilingualism. The talk was presented to the Foreign languages and Education Departments. The audience consisted of professors, undergraduate and graduate students of two universities in Colombia. Also, she presented the same topic at the International Conference on Multilingualism and Multilingual Education at University of Malta, Old Valletta Campus, 12-13 October 2023.

Another presentation took place on October 13 at the RESET reading seminar held at Tampere University and CRADLE at University of Helsinki. This group of CHAT scholars bring together researchers who use and develop cultural-historical activity theory and formative intervention methods to address acute societal challenges requiring transformations. My talk covers the adaptation of CHAT as a way to expand the knowledge and challenges of the subject in a multilingual teaching activity system.

The Roundtable for the academic year 2023-2024 commenced on October 6th. It is a monthly academic event designed for doctoral students of the Department of Applied Linguistics. During these sessions, students are expected to present their current work/projects to the department, fostering an open and inclusive environment for feedback and discussion. Each Roundtable session features a faculty moderator, an expert in the Department of Applied Linguistics, who provides valuable constructive feedback.

In this academic year, there will be a total of six Roundtable sessions. The first session, covering the topic of “Language Ideologies & Post-Secondary Contexts,” took place on October 6th. The schedule for the remaining sessions is as follows:

Fall 2023

RT 2 – Friday, November 3, 2023

RT 3 – Friday, December 1, 2023

Spring 2024

RT 4 – Friday, February 2, 2024

RT 5 – Friday, March 1, 2024

RT 6 – Friday, April 5, 2024

Congratulations to the students who presented today, and we look forward to engaging with upcoming topics and participants in future sessions!

Rosiane de Oliveira a doctoral student and Ph.D. candidate at the Applied Linguistics Department at UMass Boston will be teaching a Brazilian culture and language class at Cape Cod Healthcare which is part of the Hospitals and Physicians Clinics industry located in Massachusetts, United States.

Also, Rosiane currently is teaching a class on public speaking at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at UMass Boston. The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at UMass Boston is a community of mature adults who enjoy learning. OLLI’s mission is to promote access to learning for mature learners age 50+.

Congratulations Rosiane on these amazing teaching avenues and good luck with her dissertation that focuses on socialization, heritage language maintenance, and language policy through an ethnographic case study of a trilingual family!

Professor Panayota Gounari presented at the DNC5ALED Conference Discourses and their Impacts on a World of Multiple Crises at the University of Valencia, Spain in July 2023. Her presentation on “Rethinking Marcuse: One-Dimensional discourse, authoritarianism and social media” was part of a panel on Discourse and Critical Theory. Her talk focused on the relevance of the work of the Frankfurt School, and particularly of Marcuse’s 1964 seminal book One-Dimensional Man as a theoretical framework to understand authoritarian populist far-right discourses and their contemporary iteration in social media. This framework aspires to address current theoretical and conceptual needs for those scholars who work on authoritarian far-right populist discourses in social media, especially given the well-established connection in the Critical Discourse Studies literature between the rise of right-wing populist parties, authoritarianism, Alt-right groups and mediatization.

Dr. Gounari also co-presented at the same conference with Minh Nghia Nguyen, a doctoral student of the Department of Applied Linguistics, on their joint research project Collective memory, “Necropolitics, and Discourse: the Vietnam War Remembered” in a panel on War and Peace. Their research presents a critical multimodal discourse analysis (CMDA) of historical photographs from the Vietnam War published in the New York Times. In this project, collective memory and commemoration are perceived as a political practice, embodied discursively and used historically to coerce the “necropolitics of death” (Mbembe, 2003) on the racialized Other (Vietnamese). The project makes a novel contribution to the burgeoning body of research on the discourse of necropolitics in war remembrance that has focused, so far, mainly on textual data.

In Lyon, France, there was the 20th International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) World Congress, Professor Gounari presented presented at a panel on Ethics and Politics of Language Teacher Education in an Uneven World. She proposed a Critical Language Education agenda and a pedagogy that names, interrupts, challenges, critiques, and has a proposal for a different kind of language classrooms, curricula, schools, and communities that, in turn, affect societies and human life as a whole. How are academics, researchers, and language educators, engaging with social and political reality? Or are they? How do we educate and raise educators’ and students’ critical consciousness, so that they will find themselves on the right side of history? If educators want to invest in engaged scholarship that truly aims at improving the lives of students, their families, their communities, and our society, they must be ready to talk about the workings of power and power asymmetries, the unequal distribution of wealth and power, racism, discrimination, and the role of schooling in all this.

Chris Montecillo Leider, Professor in the Applied Linguistics Department led professional development on working with multilingual learners in her hometown school district (Ketchikan, Alaska) this summer. Continuing her critical work, Dr. Leider also did a virtual talk for the University of Nebraska Lincoln Racial Literacy Roundtables series on September 20th. Her talk Disrupting the Model Minority Myth invited the audience to discuss how the model minority myth positions Asian Americans, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Desi students’ identities. During the Racial Literacy Roundtables, Dr. Leider presented the steps forward anti-bias and anti-racist curricula and practices that center rich diversity of Asian diaspora and acknowledge their backgrounds and identities.

Doctoral student Jasen was awarded an artistic grant from the City of Boston in June to produce photos for several housing development buildings in East Boston and the Orient Heights neighborhood. This project was not solely focused on urban photography; instead, it served as an ethnography project for him, involving the documentation of the community landscape, active participation in municipal events, and collaboration with local artists ViceOne and A Trike Called Funk. During the allocated week, he conducted a graffiti workshop with these artists and hired three youth from the local Boys and Girls Club to assist him with the project, while also sharing photography skills with the youth.

Here are a couple of pictures he provided, and if you are interested in more of his works and projects, visit his instagram and homepage.

When a new academic year starts it is always an immense joy and pleasure for our faculty and doctoral students to welcome new Ph.D. students to our Applied Linguistics family at Umass Boston. This diverse cohort of bright minds such as Naomi Yamakawa, Chisom Nlebedum, Elham Khosravian, Ibrahim Abuserriah, and Elizabeth Emmons bring with them an exciting range of experiences, ambitions, new critical ideas, aspirations, and outstanding research. Following our annual tradition, we gathered for Ph.D. orientation that started in the Applied Linguistics Department and then moved to the Umass Boston gorgeous waterfront for delicious eats and treats.

During the orientation, the new cohort received information regarding their doctoral journey, met our faculty members who shared their expertise and listened to previous Ph.D. cohorts’ wisdom regarding the program itself, personal discoveries, or emerging truths that are helpful in navigating doctoral study. This was truly an amazing start to our academic year. Good luck Naomi, Chisom, Elham, Ibrahim, and Elizabeth on this new chapter of your academic career! 

UMass Boston Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics Jennifer Sclafani participated in a panel of sociolinguists and anthropologists at the International Pragmatics Association Conference in Brussels, Belgium in July 2023. The panel, entitled “Stance-taking, differentiation and (a)typicality in discourse: Ideologies of language, personhood, and competence in multilingual communities” was organized by Dr. Jacqueline Messing (University of Maryland) and Kathe Managan (University of Louisiana Lafayette) and featured speakers from across the United States. Dr. Sclafani presented her ongoing research on the language of political leadership in Boston, focusing on how mayoral candidates frame critical issues regarding K-12 education and public health in public discourse. She is looking forward to bringing the insights she gained from attending the 5-day conference back to her classroom this year.

APLING Professors Avary Carhill-Poza and Panayota Gounari (co-Directors) led a Summer Institute this past June for educators in CREATE–Centering Relationships, Equity, and Access for Teachers of English Learners–a project funded by the Office of English Language Acquisition at the U.S. Department of Education. Public school teachers and EL Directors from the Medford, Everett, Chelsea, and Cambridge public schools joined the CREATE team at the UMass Boston oceanfront campus to engage in productive discussions, about the first year of the program and plan for the next. CREATE engages cohorts of educators from across the curriculum in advocacy for multilingual learners by learning together with multilingual students’ families and communities, collaborating on professional development and teacher leadership in their district, and investing in praxis. More updates to come on this 5-year project that spans 8 public school districts. The CREATE team includes, Avary Carhill-Poza (Co-director), Panayota Gounari (Co-director), Chris Leider (ESL Teacher Specialist), Deborah Sercombe (Project Coordinator), Vannessa Quintana Sarria (Graduate Assistant).