The mission of the TOP Grant program is to nurture research talent overseas in the humanities and social sciences, the NSTC designed this program to help PhD candidates with research potential stay focused on writing their dissertations once they’ve reached that stage, and to enhance both the quality of their dissertations and the level of their research.

Congratulations, Yu-Tzu!

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Dr. Theres Grüter was the plenary speaker at the held at Seoul National University on September 20, 2025. The conference was organized by Kitaek Kim (PhD 2014).

Dr. Grüter’s talk was titled, “Why Being Surprised is a Good Thing: Prediction Error as a Form of Negative Evidence in Language Learning.”

While at the conference, Dr. Grüter was able to connect with both current and former students (by row, left to right):

Joonhee Kim (SLS PhD student)
Jieun Kim (SLS PhD 2025, Soongsil University)
Sun-Young Lee (Linguistics PhD 2003, Cyber Hankuk University of Foreign
Studies)
Jin-Hwa Lee (SLS PhD 2006, Chung-Ang University)
Kitaek Kim (SLS PhD 2014, Seoul National University)
Hyunwoo Kim (SLS PhD 2018, Yonsei University)
Theres Grüter
On-Soon Lee (Linguistics PhD 2014, Sunchon National University)
Kum-Jeong Joo (Linguistics PhD 2014, Induk University)

Congratulations on a great conference!

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Congratulations to our SLS Teaching Minor student Angel Sanchez for her accomplishment of her Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) study in Venice, Italy in summer 2024 and being featured on �鶹��ýNews! Her project was about comparing European and international cinema at the Venice International Film Festival.

Check out the �鶹��ýNews article at this link! Hoʻomaikaʻi iā Angel!

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On Friday, February 7th, the graduate assistants of the Center for Academic Spoken English (CASE) delivered a workshop on small group debate skills to Grade 10 and 11 English Language Learners at Waipahu High School. The workshop aimed to promote students’ abilities to share their opinions, respond to those of their peers, and to arrive at a consensus. The workshop was facilitated through , and CASE worked closely with Second Language Studies alumna and Waipahu High School teacher Jiamin Ruan.

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Jieun Kim, PhD candidate, is one of eight recipients of the 2024 Duolingo English Test Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Through our annual , the Duolingo English Test (DET) proudly recognizes and celebrates outstanding doctoral research in the field of language assessment.

This year’s winners represent a diverse range of projects, tackling critical challenges in language assessment with creativity and rigor. From exploring the use of virtual reality in oral proficiency testing to analyzing the impact of note-taking methods on listening comprehension, these researchers are breaking new ground and offering fresh insights into how language assessments can better serve learners, educators, and institutions around the world.

Jieun won for her dissertation on note-taking methods and their effect on listening test performance, titled “Handwritten versus typed notes: The impact of note-taking modes in second language listening tests.” Her advisor is Dr. Daniel Isbell.

Congratulations, Jieun!

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For the past 10 years, the SLS Department has partnered with Wai‘alae Elementary Public Charter School in a volunteer tutor program, in which SLS undergraduate and graduate students assist school staff in tutoring K-5 Multilingual Learners (MLLs) on a weekly basis.

Pictured are our Fall 2023 tutors, with MLL coordinator Sanna Smith, Principal Mary Wenstrom, Prof. Theres Grüter, and Prof. Betsy Gilliland. The SLS Department is grateful for the opportunity to give back directly to the community, and look forward to continuing this partnership!

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Ph.D. students Ann Tai Choe and Hitoshi Nishizawa have both received AAAL Graduate Student Awards for their presentation proposals. Both students will be practicing their talks on March 9th at the Brown Bag Thursday Lecture Series. Current SLS students, faculty, and staff are invited to watch and give feedback.

AAAL is the leading North American conference for applied linguistics, and the Department of Second Language Studies is well-known for our faculty and student representation.

Ann Tai Choe – A Comparative Analysis of Service-Learners’ Intercorporeal Co-operative Practices in the Classroom and Beyond
While past research has explored service-learning (SL)—an experiential pedagogy that engages students in community-based service activities and reflection on their experiences—in the second language (L2) context (e.g., Poteau, 2020; Wurr & Hellebrandt, 2007), only a few studies have examined participants’ social practices for accomplishing SL in real-time interaction (e.g., Perren, 2007). Furthermore, the nexus between classroom learning and real-world service activities remains underexplored (Overfield, 2007). To inform decisions about L2 education across diverse linguistic and situational contexts, it is important to consider how classroom learning may be linked to out-of-school experiences (e.g., Eskildsen & Majlesi, 2018; Hellermann et al., 2019). This study aims to address this issue by investigating how L2 users achieve SL as a social activity and comparing participants’ practices across different educational settings.

Data come from a larger project that investigates how adult L2 users of English in Hawaiʻi achieve SL as a social activity (approx. 26h of video-recordings). Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study scrutinizes participants’ intercorporeal co-operative practices (Goodwin, 2018; Meyer et al., 2017) in the classroom and beyond. Participants included the L2 users, service agency supervisors, community volunteers, and teachers. Findings revealed that participants frequently employed intercorporeal co-operative actions by producing synchronized or sequentially mirrored actions (Hellermann & Thorne, 2022) during both classroom and service interaction. However, at the service sites (e.g., outdoor fundraising, lantern preparation, letter folding), participants developed and coordinated co-operative actions (e.g., moving and stopping together, bodily transformations) as an activity-specific technique for collaborative task accomplishment, done with or without talk; in contrast, participants in the classroom oriented to achieving intersubjectivity, building affiliation, and invoking humor or shared past experiences via wordplays and reenactment. These findings suggest that SL fosters opportunities for achieving cooperation and intersubjectivity through language and moving bodies across various experiential contexts (Atkinson, 2019).

Hitoshi Nishizawa – Authenticity of listening input: How strong is the shared-L1 effect in more authentic texts?
There is an increasing interest in the authenticity of listening input in language tests. To increase authenticity, scholars advocate the inclusion of L2 accents that represent the sociolinguistic reality of the target language use (TLU) domains (Harding, 2012; Kang et al., 2019). Others have also suggested the use of texts that better reflect the nature of spoken language, including phenomena such as hesitations, false starts, and repetitions (Wagner, 2014). Both approaches have been shown to impact test scores, yet to date, no study has directly compared the effects of each approach nor examined the combination of the two. By investigating the interaction of the two aspects, the present study offers more insight into the relationship between the authenticity of listening input and test scores.

To examine how L2 accent inputs interact with spoken texts, academic lecture texts from IELTS (section 4) were used to create two versions of texts: scripted and authenticated. For the scripted version, original texts were used (Wagner, 2016). For the authenticated texts, texts were rewritten to include spoken language features (Wagner et al., 2021). Audio samples were recorded by an American speaker and a L1 Japanese speaker, who were teaching assistants in the US university. For listeners, Japanese learners of English were recruited to examine the shared-L1 effect.

Data collection is ongoing and a preliminary analysis of 41 listeners (with the planned sample size being 200) found an interaction between accent and scriptedness. The shared-L1 effect was only observed in the scripted texts, but not in the authenticated text. The test score for the authenticated-Japanese text was similar to authenticated-American and scripted-American texts. Building on previous studies, the finding suggests another mediating factor for the shared-L1 effect: scriptedness of the text. Implications for test developers and suggestions for future research will be discussed.

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Congratulations, Hoa!

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Dear Graduates,

Obviously congratulations on having made it this far under very difficult circumstances. Despite everything, you focused and finished. We your teachers likewise determined to up our online skills and put everything but you out of our minds (at least while class was running). I hope that we can see, in the middle distance, some possibility of a non-Covid world, for you to take and make your own. And in it, the international mobility that languages bring, should still be yours, facilitated by the diploma which like a flying carpet will, I hope, wing you to your desired destination.

Aloha, until we meet again,
Dr. Graham V. Crookes
Department Chair

For a full list and recognition from CALL Dean Dr. Peter Arnade,

The post <span class="entry-title-primary">Congratulations SLS Graduates!</span><span class="entry-subtitle">Fall 2020</span> appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Congratulations to Chau Truong (SLS MA Summer 2020 graduate) on receiving the Harry Whitten Prize for Scholarly Excellence for her Scholarly Paper titled “EFL Writing Teacher Education and Development in Vietnam.”

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