Second Language Studies is delighted to welcome Ms. Nai Yi “Nerry” Htoon from Myanmar! Ms. Htoon is a virtual fellow in the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Professional Fellows Program (YSEALI PFP), a program of the U.S. Department of State that runs from March 16-April 10, 2026. SLS serves as her institutional fellowship host. Along with an MA in English from Yangon University of Foreign Languages, Nerry also has earned a CELTA certificate and is a candidate for a DELTA certificate. She serves as the Training, Development and Recruitment Director at International House Yangon-Mandalay, where she focuses on hiring, professional development, and well-being of the school’s teachers. She also is the Academic Head of the English Language Program at the American Center Yangon (a nonprofit program run by the U.S. Embassy), teaching exam preparation classes and conducting voluntary community teacher training programs for teachers and monk teachers in remote areas of the country. In her fellowship, Nerry is especially interested in learning more about current American practices in second language pedagogy along with expanding her knowledge related to teacher development and support. She will be working directly with Kenny Harsch (serving as fellowship host for SLS). She hopes to talk with faculty and program directors who have similar interests, and to find a project that allows SLS to tap into her knowledge and experience.

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First released in 2019, the Stanford University World’s Top 2% Scientists list is updated annually, with the seventh and latest version published in Fall 2024, which includes 100,000 scholars from more than 20 fields and 174 subfields, highlighting research contributions for the 2023 calendar year.

The ranking is based on an analysis of citation impact across multiple scientific fields and subfields using data from Scopus, a large multidisciplinary database that indexes scientific journals from the health sciences, life sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences. The ranking considers scholars who have published multiple highly cited papers and evaluates the citation impact of their work using various metrics, taking into account both career-long citation impact and the impact in a single recent year.

Professor Emeritus James Dean Brown, the late Professor Richard Schmidt, and current Professors Graham Crookes and Gabriele Kasper feature on both the career-long impact list and single recent year list (for 2023).

In addition, Professor Bonnie D. Schwartz features on the career-long impact list.

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Along with some key areas of the campus, Dr. Christina Higgins, one of the huaka‘i’s co-founders, is quoted:

“The hope is to recognize the uniqueness of our location, and to feel welcome to learn more about that together,” said Christina Higgins, professor of��Second Language Studies��(SLS) and one of the tour’s co-creators. “It’s really an invitation to lean into the unique history and opportunities to learn in���Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ�����ٴDz���ٳ���.”

For more information, .

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Dr. Betsy Gilliland has been awarded the CALL Award for Excellence in Teaching! She was recognized in the

Congratulations, Dr. Gilliland!

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The SLS Summer Abroad Pre-Departure Meeting brought together students preparing to go abroad during the Summer of 2025. Participants connected with fellow travelers, heard valuable advice from past students who went to the Deep Dive Program through CCS-Peking University, and discussed ways to represent SLS and the U.S. positively while overseas. The session also highlighted tips for making the most of their experience and navigating. We wish all of our students a meaningful and memorable journey abroad!

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Congratulations, Asia!

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1. “” in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
2. “” in Studies in Second Language Acquisition

Both papers were also attributed to Alice’s PhD advisor Dr. Theres Grüter. Both of these papers were included in Alice’s PhD manuscript-based dissertation, titled “Second language learning and predictive processing of the Mandarin dative alternation.”

Congratulations, Dr. Alice (Yanxin) Zhu!

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MA Graduate Hoan Nguyen (2024) published her co-authored paper “” with MA advisor Dr. Theres Grüter in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.

The article was based on her Scholarly Paper, and is available in full.

Abstract:

Recent research has highlighted the value of investigating the online language processing of heritage speakers (HS) as a means of accessing their implicit language knowledge (Montrul, 2023). While studies have shown that Spanish and Polish HS use grammatical gender cues to predict upcoming nouns (Fuchs, 2022a, 2022b), less is known about Vietnamese HS’ use of prenominal classifiers (e.g.,��con��for animate objects,����á����for inanimate objects) to facilitate their processing (but see Ito et��al., 2024). This study examined if and how home-country raised and heritage speakers of Vietnamese in the U.S. use classifiers to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns, and whether heritage language proficiency is a modulating factor. Forty-one adult native speakers of Vietnamese (18 home-country raised, 23 HS) completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, an offline cloze test to assess knowledge of classifier–noun pairings, and a Vietnamese listening proficiency test. The results indicate that despite more variable knowledge of classifier–noun pairings and generally slower lexical access, HS use classifiers as a semantically informative cue during real-time comprehension, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent than their home-country raised peers. Increased proficiency in the heritage language, whether measured objectively or self-rated, was not found to enhance engagement in prediction.

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Name & Bio: Jieun Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, focusing on language testing. She taught English in Korea and received her MA from Seoul National University. Her dissertation examines the effects of different note-taking modes (handwriting versus typing) on L2 learners’ listening comprehension and contents of notes (e.g., word count, translanguaging).
Home Country: South Korea
Dissertation Title: Handwritten Versus Typed Notes: The Impact of Note-Taking Modes in Second Language Listening Tests
TIRF Research Topic Investigated: Language Assessment
Doctoral Supervisor: Prof. Daniel Isbell, University of Hawai’I Mānoa

Name & Bio: Rickey Larkin is a PhD candidate in Second Language Studies at the University of �Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ�� at Mānoa. In his dissertation, Rickey takes an autoethnographic approach in examining language policy and planning at Benguet State University (BSU), located in the Cordilleras, Philippines. Specifically, he positions his work to contribute to BSU’s explicit goals of internationalization and incorporating Indigenous values.
Home Country: USA
Dissertation Title: Mountains Under Water: Autoethnography through Language Policy and Planning in the Cordilleras
TIRF Research Topic Investigated: Language Planning and Policy
Doctoral Supervisor: Prof. Christina Higgins, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa

Congratulations, Jieun and Rickey!

Featured image courtesy of TIRF

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Teaching is a highly complex and context-dependent activity that requires teachers’ strategic employment of embodied resources tailored to the specific instructional contexts. Particularly, the coordination of teachers’ whole-body movements, or��mobility, becomes indispensable for instructions during small-group rounds (Jakonen, 2020), where teachers monitor and guide students, organize on-task activity, and engage in social talk. Drawing upon multimodal conversation analysis, the present study explores teacher movement, extending beyond walking to encompass leaning in, bending over, sitting with, and kneeling next to students, during a prolonged desk interaction. The analysis demonstrates how mobility is a professional resource that can be skillfully deployed in creating pedagogical opportunities that promote students’ task engagement. The findings also reveal how students respond through mutual displays of bodily engagement that are sequentially and temporally aligning to the instruction. Overall, the study hopes to offer further insights into teacher mobility through fine-grained analysis of subtle bodily movements that engenders mutual student engagement during small-group rounds.

Sera’s initial draft served as one of her Qualifying Papers, and she presented her findings in a Brown Bag Seminar in Fall 2023.

Congratulations, Sera!

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