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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Congratulations, Hoa!

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Youngmeen Kim (Spring 2021 MA graduate) will be joining the Georgia State University’s Applied Linguistics program as a first-year PhD student in the fall.

Inyoung Na (Spring 2021 MA graduate) will be joining the Applied Linguistics and Technology PhD program at Iowa State University this fall as a first-year PhD student.

Denis Melik Tangiyev (Summer 2021 MA graduate) will be joining the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Purdue University as a first-year PhD student in Learning Design & Technology.

Youngmeen

The post <span class="entry-title-primary">Congratulations to our MA graduates who will be starting PhD programs in the fall</span><span class="entry-subtitle">Adam Bramlett, Youngmeen Kim, Inyoung Na, and Denis Melik Tangiyev</span> appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is the nation’s largest study abroad fellowship program, facilitating cultural exchange through direct immersion in a host country and interaction with a local community. The English Teaching Assistant Programs place Fulbright grant recipients in classrooms around the world to assist local English teachers while serving as cultural ambassadors for the United States.

To learn more about Victoria and her journey through our Bachelor’s and Master’s degree pathway program, visit /news/2021/05/26/motivated-student-fast-track-masters-degree/.

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As a Postdoctoral Fellow, Gavin will be collaborating on research projects applying multi-disciplinary language research methods to investigate environmental issues in Norway including climate activism, environmental education and ecocultural communication practices among urban youth in Oslo. His position at the University of Oslo runs from August 2021 through August 2023.

The post Dr. Gavin Lamb’s new position at MultiLing at the University of Oslo, Norway appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

This year, Dr. Betsy Gilliland was awarded the Presidential Citation for Meritorious Teaching, which recognizes �鶹��ýMānoa faculty members who have made significant contributions to teaching and student learning.

Congratulations, Dr. Gilliland!

For a full list of 2021 awardees, please visit /news/2021/05/05/2021-uh-manoa-awards/.

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Title: Towards Critical Literacy in Korean High School EFL Classrooms: Narrative Inquiry of Teacher Emotions and Critical Materials

Abstract: This dissertation explores the emotional landscapes of two Korean EFL high school teachers as they begin to incorporate critical literacy practices into their regular high school EFL instruction. Critical literacy focuses on the connection between literacy and power by giving literacy a socio-political dimension (Janks, 2010, 2013). Language teachers are encouraged to help their students achieve a deeper understanding of texts by discussing how power dynamics are inscribed in everyday life, engaging in active analysis of the text, and offering strategies for uncovering the underlying messages within texts (Luke, 2012). In the critical classroom, language teachers are no longer the sole source of authority or knowledge, and students take on the role of active agents who co-construct knowledge with their peers and teachers to transform their reality in a way that allows them to read both the ‘word’ and the ‘world’ (Freire & Macedo, 1987). This learning process is indispensable for cultivating mature democratic citizens who have creative and critical minds endowed with the profound empathy to change both their own lives and the world around them.

Attempting to use critical literacy materials, however, can pose a number of challenges for teachers in Korean EFL high schools given the country’s test-oriented and top-down educational system. For successful implementation of critical literacy in this context, it is important to develop an understanding of teacher emotions because knowing how teachers feel is essential to understanding their teacher identities and instructional practices (Benesch, 2012; Zembylas, 2013). To investigate teacher emotions, I draw on a narrative inquiry framework and triangulate data from longitudinal teacher narratives (collected before, during, and after the implementation of critical materials), audio-recorded classroom interactions (collected over the course of a semester), and official school documents.

The findings show that the teachers experienced a range of emotions, both positive and negative. While they initially reported having negative emotions such as resistance, uncertainty, lack of confidence, and even bodily discomfort (e.g., ‘sweat on the back’), these negative emotions were changed into positive ones through emotional engagement with critical literacy practices as the teachers co-constructed knowledge with their students. The teachers used critical literacy as a mediation tool to overcome the dissonance between their personal beliefs and their teaching practices, which in turn led to the formation of renewed, empowered, and legitimate teacher identities. This study provides teacher narratives and descriptions of classroom-based interactions for use in critical language teacher education, a discussion of pedagogical implications for critical materials development, and recommendations for a paradigm shift towards critical literacy in test-oriented Korean high school EFL classrooms and similar contexts.

The post <span class="entry-title-primary">PhD in SLS Dissertation Defense on Friday, May 14 at 1:00 pm HST</span><span class="entry-subtitle">Hyeyoung Jung</span> appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Congratulations to Joseph Ritch who has been awarded the prestigious Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Tajikistan for the 2021-22 academic year! We congratulate him on this outstanding accomplishment and in joining previous departmental recipients.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is the nation’s largest study abroad fellowship program, facilitating cultural exchange through direct immersion in a host country and interaction with a local community. The English Teaching Assistant Programs place Fulbright grant recipients in classrooms around the world to assist local English teachers while serving as cultural ambassadors for the United States.

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Dr. Holger Hopp and Dr. Theres Grüter’s publication in Second Language Research is available now. The article is titled “The time-course of competition from the L1 grammar in L2 sentence processing: Evidence from cross-linguistic structural priming.” Check it out !

The post <span class="entry-title-primary">New publication in Second Language Research</span><span class="entry-subtitle">By Dr. Holger Hopp and SLS Faculty Dr. Theres Grüter</span> appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

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Title: The Persian particle dige in professional-client interaction

Abstract: An extensive body of pragmatic and linguistic research deals with a group of connective expressions such as well, so, and now as discourse markers (DMs). These expressions can be used in different positions and with different functions, and they play diverse and important roles in discourse interpretation. DMs have been studied from the disciplinary perspectives of several language-related fields, including relevance theory, politeness theory, and discourse analysis (e.g., Aijmer, 2002; Fraser, 1996; Schiffrin, 1985, 1987, 2001; Schourup, 1999, 2011). In addition, a considerable literature examines DMs called discourse particles from the social-interactional perspective of conversation analysis across a variety of languages (Beach, 1993; Bolden, 2006, 2008; Hayano, 2011, 2013; Heritage, 2015; Kärkkäinen, 2003; Keevallik, 2010; Taleghani-Nikazm, 2015; Wu, 2004). However, research on discourse particles in natural interaction in Persian is very limited and it remains an understudied research topic. This study investigates how speakers of Persian deploy the particle dige as an interactional resource to manage face-to-face encounters between a professional and her clients in the institutional setting of a photo studio. The particle dige occurs frequently in Persian conversation, and it occurs in initial, medial, or final position, bearing different prosodic features within a turn and highlighting the saliency of particular conversational moves.

This study’s data come from 15 video and audio recorded photo selection sessions, each approximately 60–90 minutes long, for about 15 hours in total. The study employs conversation analysis (CA: Sidnell & Stivers, 2013), multimodal conversation analysis (Deppermann, 2013; Goodwin, 2000), and interactional linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018) to investigate how speakers of Persian deploy dige as an interactional resource to manage talk-in-interaction in the institutional setting. Specifically, it investigates the interactional work of dige in turn-medial position through the analysis of sequence organization and embodied action.

The findings of this study show that turn-medial dige occurs in second position in response to different focal actions such as requesting, seeking information, seeking confirmation, seeking assessment, proposing, and suggesting. The analysis shows that the particle dige occurs in interactional environments in which speakers claim epistemic primacy or authority that is rooted in their social or interactional roles (Stivers, 2005).

The findings also demonstrate that dige is used in turns that account for speakers’ prior turns. The participants of the study offer accounts with dige to avoid potentially problematic inferences of their prior turns or to claim responsibility for the possible accountability of their prior turns. The findings of this study are expected to be useful in the development of materials for teaching Persian as a foreign language. This study thus contributes to a large and rapidly growing literature on discourse markers as well as to research on integrating CA-based materials into the language classroom.

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