I am currently keeping busy with the following research projects:
1. With the undergraduate curriculum established and implemented to a large degree, I have just completed work on studying the writing development that occurs within the curriculum. To that end, I collected end-of-year writing performances from all levels of the curriculum (N = 152; 131,932 tokens) in April 2012, 2013, 2014, & 2015 and then worked with an undergraduate research assistant on conducting syntactic complexity and transitivity analyses of the cross-sectional data. Of the 152 learners who submitted writing performances to the learner corpus, 3 have completed three consecutive levels within the curriculum and thus form a small longitudinal cohort that is the focus of a case study into their intra- and inter-clausal development as an aspect of an emergent advanced L2 writing ability. An article on this case study appeared this year in the journal System.
2. Because of my growing interest in approaches to experiential learning in the L2 classroom combined with my involvement in Emory's summer program in Vienna, Austria, I have become interested in the development of a pedagogical framework for teaching the linguistic landscape in the second language classroom. Twice now students have conducted field-based research on the linguistic landscape of the city with a particular eye toward how Vienna’s multiculturalism is manifested (or not) in publicly displayed language. Not only have these projects helped students gain a new perspective into the city’s multicultural and multilingual landscape, but they also have had to grapple with fundamental questions about applied linguistics research methodology. Two articles on this topic, one in English in an edited volume and one in German in Der Deutschunterricht, have appeared in print, and I am co-editing two separate volumes on the topic of language learning in the linguistic landscape with David Malinowski (San Jose State University) and Sebastien Dubreil (Carnegie Mellon University). One of the volumes appeared with Springer in 2020, and the other is slated for 2021 publication as an open educational resource with Manifold with support from the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.
3. A third project grew out of a collaboration with Glenn Levine (UC-Irvine) that aimed to better understand the experiences of international students in collegiate foreign language classes in the United States. Based on initial findings from a pilot study conducted in spring 2016, we carried out a case study of international students and documented their experiences as a German language learner in the U.S. In addition to their interaction with the pedagogy and instructional materials, we also focused on understanding how their exposure to this new language interacted with other languages at their disposal in terms of their own identity. Initial findings were presented at the 2018 annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Chicago, and I am now conducting a nexus analysis of one international learner's progression through the first-year German curriculum with plans for publication in 2021.
October 2020
1. With the undergraduate curriculum established and implemented to a large degree, I have just completed work on studying the writing development that occurs within the curriculum. To that end, I collected end-of-year writing performances from all levels of the curriculum (N = 152; 131,932 tokens) in April 2012, 2013, 2014, & 2015 and then worked with an undergraduate research assistant on conducting syntactic complexity and transitivity analyses of the cross-sectional data. Of the 152 learners who submitted writing performances to the learner corpus, 3 have completed three consecutive levels within the curriculum and thus form a small longitudinal cohort that is the focus of a case study into their intra- and inter-clausal development as an aspect of an emergent advanced L2 writing ability. An article on this case study appeared this year in the journal System.
2. Because of my growing interest in approaches to experiential learning in the L2 classroom combined with my involvement in Emory's summer program in Vienna, Austria, I have become interested in the development of a pedagogical framework for teaching the linguistic landscape in the second language classroom. Twice now students have conducted field-based research on the linguistic landscape of the city with a particular eye toward how Vienna’s multiculturalism is manifested (or not) in publicly displayed language. Not only have these projects helped students gain a new perspective into the city’s multicultural and multilingual landscape, but they also have had to grapple with fundamental questions about applied linguistics research methodology. Two articles on this topic, one in English in an edited volume and one in German in Der Deutschunterricht, have appeared in print, and I am co-editing two separate volumes on the topic of language learning in the linguistic landscape with David Malinowski (San Jose State University) and Sebastien Dubreil (Carnegie Mellon University). One of the volumes appeared with Springer in 2020, and the other is slated for 2021 publication as an open educational resource with Manifold with support from the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.
3. A third project grew out of a collaboration with Glenn Levine (UC-Irvine) that aimed to better understand the experiences of international students in collegiate foreign language classes in the United States. Based on initial findings from a pilot study conducted in spring 2016, we carried out a case study of international students and documented their experiences as a German language learner in the U.S. In addition to their interaction with the pedagogy and instructional materials, we also focused on understanding how their exposure to this new language interacted with other languages at their disposal in terms of their own identity. Initial findings were presented at the 2018 annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Chicago, and I am now conducting a nexus analysis of one international learner's progression through the first-year German curriculum with plans for publication in 2021.
October 2020
