Applied Linguistics Department

The summer was a busy time for many academics such as attending conferences, teaching summer courses, collecting data for projects, and launching summer institutes. June started off with a local and great 2023 MATSOL Conference which brings together educators, teachers, researchers, administrators, and graduate students who are passionate about multilingualism and English Learners from across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

This 2023 MATSOL Conference was particularly special for the Department of Applied Linguistics because Dr. Chris Montecillo Leider the Assistant Professor Department of Applied Linguistics became the President of MATSOL. Congratulations!

At the conference, Dr. Chris Montecillo Leider and her colleague Dr. Christina Dobbs presented A Framework for Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Writing Assessment that supports educators to write rubrics for culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Also, doctoral candidates Iuliia Fakhrutdinova, Nasiba Norova, and Vannessa Quintana Sarria presented their work Re-Envisioning Academic Mentoring: The Power of Peer Mentoring in Graduate School that discusses collaborative work among graduate students.

Juan David Gutierrez successfully defended his dissertation: Building Bridges, Crossing Borders: Narratives of Multilingual Students First-Year College Experiences (Committee: Panayota Gounari (Chair), Kimberly Urbanski, Tara Parker) and Jesse Rubio successfully defended her dissertation: Educational Language Policy for Multilingual Learners: Leveraging Policy’s Multiple Dimensions and Discourses (Committee: Avary Carhill-Poza (Chair), Panayota Gounari, Amanda Kibler, and Jeff Bale). Congratulations Dr. Gutierrez and Dr. Rubio, the first graduates from our Doctoral Program in Applied Linguistics. 

It is official! The Department of Applied Linguistics is thrilled to welcome an accomplished and brilliant sociolinguist, an amazing educator, and a lovely colleague to the Department starting in Fall 2023. Congratulations Dr. Jennifer Sclafani on your appointment as tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at UMass Boston!

Dr. Sclafani’s research on the language of Donald Trump has been published as a book, Talking Donald Trump: A Sociolinguistic Study of Style, Metadiscourse, and Political Identity (Routledge, 2017), and her analyses of US presidential politics have been featured in news outlets including The Washington Post, Scientific American, CNN Politics, BBC Radio 4, PBS News Hour, CBC Radio, and The Guardian, among others. Her research has also appeared in academic journals, such as Language in Society and Journal of Sociolinguistics.

Currently, Dr. Sclafani is leading Justice Language Action Project that incorporates Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and critical pedagogy. This project provides professional development to K-12 teachers in Boston public schools.

Check out her website!

Doctoral student Wonguk Cho gave an online presentation at the 2023 EPIC-Lang Conference held at UCLA under the agenda of Reimagined Critical Pedagogy: Resistance and Solidarity in Language Classrooms.

Abstract

Despite the extensive discussion on Critical Language Pedagogy (CLP) and its application in various contexts in the last decades, critically oriented English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching in Chinese colleges has been seldom examined. Employing the framework of CLP, I investigated the feasibility of successfully introducing and implementing CLP in a large four-year university in China that has been administered and funded by the Chinese central government. I also investigated the forms of resistance to the oppressive social structure, power dynamics, and unfair/unequal situations that my students encountered on campus, in school, and in the community. More specifically in this study, I analyzed my students’ PowerPoint slides which they created for a persuasive speech task. Employing Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, the study explored how the students hedged, conformed, and framed themselves through utilizing multiple semiotic forms/structures, including language use, visual elements, and personal anecdotes. The findings indicate that the students successfully engaged in the task and voiced what was wrong around them, but the majority of them avoided and were reluctant to identify who was responsible for the problematic situations, conforming to those in power, and in the hierarchy.

Doctoral candidate Nghia Minh Nguyen published her reflective piece Adult Immigrants and Refugees: A (Needed) Shift toward Multilingualism and Social Justice on public library ESOL for adult immigrants and refugees in MASOL Currents. Please, check her work here link!

UMass Boston Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics Chris Montecillo Leider with her colleague Assistant Professor Program Director, English Education Christina Dobbs are presenting a workshop at the upcoming Women of Color in the Academy Conference. Please, register for the event here!

Co-principals UMass Boston Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics Avary Carhill-Poza  and Professor of Applied Linguistics Panayota Gounari along with Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics Chris Leider presented their project Centering Relationships, Equity, and Access for Teachers of English Learners (CREATE) at The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) in Washington DC.

Check out more about CREATE here!

Apling AAAL 2023: Portland Experience

This year the Department of Applied Linguistics of Umass Boston had at least 17 presentations at AAAL 2023 in Portland! Professors and doctoral students participated in individual presentations, colloquia, round tables, and posters. The topics presented diverse and critical stance on language policy, teacher education, research methods, bilingual education, heritage languages, multilingualism, critical discourse analysis, pedagogy, and literacy. The Umass Boston APLING presentations invited their audience to have conversations about gender justice in applied linguistics, decolonization, critical race and language studies, immigrant and refugee rights, and more.

Congratulations APLING!

Doctoral candidate Rosiane Barcelos de Oliveira, Visiting Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics Jennifer Sclafani at Umass Boston, and Alexander Nikolaou from Hellenic American University presented their critical reflections on qualitative research methods at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2023. Their presentation titled Critical Reflections on Qualitative Research Methods in the Study of Affect in Heritage Language Maintenance in Bilingual, Immersion, Heritage, and Minority Education (BIH) strand explored the maintenance of Brazilian Portuguese and Modern Greek in North American diasporic contexts. Rosiane, Dr. Sclafani, and Dr. Nikolaou drew on their experiences in a multi-sited ethnographic case study of a trilingual family (Portuguese, Spanish, English) and ethnographic interviews of adult heritage language speakers of Modern Greek.

Doctoral candidate Nghia Minh Nguyen and Kimberly Urbanski, Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics, led a colloquium titled The Impact of Pedagogy on Teacher Mediation and Gesture for Multilinguals at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2023 (Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy (PED) strand).

Minh and Dr. Urbanski drew on the research conducted for 14 weeks in a French narrative literacy class. They coded the teacher’s gesture dimensions and conducted conversation analysis and microgenesis. Minh and Dr. Urbanski said: “We conclude that the nature of the pedagogy had greater impact on the teacher’s gesture than the learners’ L1 and discuss the importance of gesture as a semiotic resource in an inclusive pedagogy for multilinguals’ literacy development.“