I am currently keeping busy with the following research projects:
1. Now that we in the German Studies Department have successfully revised our curriculum to integrate the study of language and content across all four years of the undergraduate program, we are turning our attention to particular enhancements to the curriculum. Most recently, we have concentrated on specifying to a greater degree the language acquisitional foci for the two highest levels of the program (levels 3 and 4) in order to differentiate the pedagogical and discursive focus of each level. This work involves reexamining the tasks and the model texts used at each level to bring them into line with the acquisitional foci for the level. We also are revisiting the thematic foci of the first three levels to determine if they represent the topical areas that best capture the types of seminal issues and cultural narratives of the German-speaking world.
2. 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 interclausal development as an aspect of an emergent advanced L2 writing ability. Initial findings were presented at the 2015 annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Toronto, Canada.
3. 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. Initial findings from these classroom-based projects were presented at the Linguistic Landscape 7 Workshop in Berkeley, CA in May 2015, at the 2016 annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Orlando, FL, and at the Linguistics Landscape 9 Workshop in Luxembourg in April 2017.
4. My latest project is in collaboration with Glenn Levine (UC-Irvine) and aims 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 are focusing on understanding how their exposure to this new language interacts with other languages at their disposal in terms of their own identity. Initial findings were presented at the 2017 annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Portland, Oregon.
July 2017
1. Now that we in the German Studies Department have successfully revised our curriculum to integrate the study of language and content across all four years of the undergraduate program, we are turning our attention to particular enhancements to the curriculum. Most recently, we have concentrated on specifying to a greater degree the language acquisitional foci for the two highest levels of the program (levels 3 and 4) in order to differentiate the pedagogical and discursive focus of each level. This work involves reexamining the tasks and the model texts used at each level to bring them into line with the acquisitional foci for the level. We also are revisiting the thematic foci of the first three levels to determine if they represent the topical areas that best capture the types of seminal issues and cultural narratives of the German-speaking world.
2. 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 interclausal development as an aspect of an emergent advanced L2 writing ability. Initial findings were presented at the 2015 annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Toronto, Canada.
3. 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. Initial findings from these classroom-based projects were presented at the Linguistic Landscape 7 Workshop in Berkeley, CA in May 2015, at the 2016 annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Orlando, FL, and at the Linguistics Landscape 9 Workshop in Luxembourg in April 2017.
4. My latest project is in collaboration with Glenn Levine (UC-Irvine) and aims 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 are focusing on understanding how their exposure to this new language interacts with other languages at their disposal in terms of their own identity. Initial findings were presented at the 2017 annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Portland, Oregon.
July 2017
