Dr. Laura Collins, who is the First Vice-President of AAAL, was the Conference Chair for the conference, which attracted 1500 attendees and offered over 900 presentations across 21 strands of language interest topics. Plenary talks included an extremely popular session given by Concordia Distinguished Professor Emeritus Dr. Patsy M. Lightbown and her colleague Dr. Nina Spada (a Concordia alumnus).
notice
Department of Education at the American Association of Applied Linguistics
March 26, 2019
|
Faculty and students from the TESL/ESL/Applied Linguistics group were very active at the annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference, held in Atlanta, Georgia, March 9 – 12, 2019. https://www.aaal.org/events/2019-aaal-conference
Dr. Laura Collins
(left to right) Lauren Strachan, June Ruivivar, and Clinton Hendry
Laura was ably assisted in the two years of planning leading up to the conference by Concordia doctoral students June Ruivivar (associate conference chair), Clinton Hendry, and Lauren Strachan. One of the highlights of the conference was the screening of the first feature film made in the Haida language, Edge of the Knife https://www.aaal.org/2019-special-showing-of-film---edge-of-the-knife
Laura will now assume the role of President of the Association for the next 12 months.
Although the acceptance rate for presentations was only 55%, graduate students were very active in presenting.
MA student Marie Apaloo - “Examining the effects of cross-linguistic awareness on the acquisition of English possessive determiners: The case of Brazilian Portuguese “, co-presented with supervisor Walcir Cardoso (TESL/Applied Linguistics).
PhD student Susan Jackson - “The effect of orthography on the acquisition of English /h/ by francophone learners”, supervised by Walcir Cardoso (TESL/Applied Linguistics).
M.A. graduate Cynthia Lapierre - “L1 influence and developmental sequences: Acquisition of his/her by Taiwanese Mandarin learners”, co-presented with supervisor Laura Collins (TESL/Applied Linguistics).
PhD student Lauren Strachan - “Dynamic comprehensibility: Investigating changes in self- and listener ratings of comprehensibility during L2- L2 interaction “, co-presented with supervisor Pavel Trofimovich and Sara Kennedy (TESL/Applied Linguistics).
PhD student Kim Taylor Reid - “Wow! He did so much better than me!" Perspective taking to mitigate social bias in L2 speech rating“, co-presented with supervisor Pavel Trofimovich (TESL/Applied Linguistics).
Faculty members also presented and facilitated workshops.
Dr, Teresa Hernández González gave an extremely well-received pre-conference workshop on the gamification of language teaching and research, “More than points and badges: Using gamification to "level up" research, task design, and assessment” https://www.aaal.org/2019-pre-conference-workshop-teresa-hernandez-gonzalez
Heike Neumann (ESL/TESL) and Kim McDonough (TESL/Applied Linguistics) presented “Addressing L2 writers’ challenges in read-to-write tasks”.
Angelica Galante (TESL/Applied Linguistics) presented “Examining translanguaging as pedagogy for vocabularydevelopment: A mixed methods study with multilingual EAP students in a Canadian university” and co-presented “Developing and implementing a new pedagogical framework: data from plurilingual action-oriented scenarios in North American language classrooms”.
Sara Kennedy and Pavel Trofimovich (TESL/Applied Linguistics) presented “Assessing French as a lingua franca: Teachers' and learners' perspectives”.
Congratulations to all!