We are very pleased to announce that Eunhae Cho, doctoral student in Applied Linguistics, received one of this year's Liberal Arts External Funding Incentive Awards. Congratulations Eunhae!

Congratulations to Tianfang (Sally) Wang and Yuanheng (Arthur) Wang on receiving Superior Teaching and Research (STAR) Awards from the College of the Liberal Arts. The STAR award recognizes graduate students who have excelled in all aspects of their graduate program.

Dr. Katherine Masters (APLNG '20), who holds a position at the University of Texas at San Antonio, received one of the 2022 Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE) Concha Delgado-Gaitan Presidential Fellow award. The award supports research of early career scholars. Congratulations, Katie!

We congratulate APLNG doctoral student Eunhae Cho, who received a Doctoral Dissertation Grant from TIRF,  the International Research Foundation for English Language Education.

We congratulate APLNG doctoral student Yulia Khoruzhaya for receiving one of the NFMLTA-MLJ Graduate Dissertation Writing Support awards this year.

It is wonderful news to have two students from our department to be awarded in 2022!

APLNG doctoral student Jingyuan Zhuang is the recipient of the 2022 Dissertation Writing Support Grant, which is given by the NFMLTA and the Modern Language Journal. The NFMLTA is the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations. The grant was instituted in 2013. Congratulations, Jingyuan!

Congratulations to Dr. Kevin McManus, Director of the Center for Language Acquisition, and the CALPER team, who have been awarded a new grant from the US Department of Education’s Language Resource Center competition. This grant provides four years of funding to support and strengthen the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER) as a key resource for improving the Nation's capacity for teaching and learning foreign languages through  research, materials development, and dissemination projects.

Since its inception in 2002, the Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER) has focused on the development of high-quality instructional materials as well as teaching and assessment strategies designed to promote advanced levels of proficiency, in both less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) like Arabic, Korean, Russian, and more commonly taught languages like Spanish and German. A defining feature of CALPER is that its projects are informed by cutting-edge research on the learning and teaching of languages as well as current theories of second language (L2) learning and teaching (e.g., Kim et al., 2018; Lantolf & Poehner, 2011). In the current proposal, we significantly extend CALPER’s twenty-year track record in at least three ways. First, our ten new language teaching and learning projects are conceptualized and framed in principles of Usage-Based Language Instruction (UBLI), an evidence-based approach to language teaching sensitive to features of the learning context itself and the experiences and prior language knowledge that learners bring to the classroom (McManus, 2022a; see also McManus, 2019, 2021; Tyler & Ortega, 2018; Verspoor & Nguyen, 2015). Second, all CALPER’s resources and events will be openly available and easily accessible through our well-established online presence (e.g., social media, membership lists, website) and online repositories tailored for specific language learning and teaching communities (e.g., CLTNet for teachers of Chinese in Pennsylvania). As a result, CALPER contributes significantly not only to promoting equity in access to educational resources and opportunities, but also to fostering and encouraging broader participation in open-access and open scholarship initiatives to expand and facilitate dialogue between research and pedagogy (Marsden et al., 2019; Sato et al., 2021). Third, we expand CALPER into a consortium relationship with the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), a Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) located in the second largest city in the Southern US. In these ways, the current proposal extends CALPER as a critical resource for improving the Nation’s capacity for teaching and learning foreign languages, especially LCTLs.

CALPER team

Core management team:

Kevin McManus, Penn State University (Center Director)

Olesya Kisselev, UTSA (Co-Director)

Jialing Wang, Penn State University (Associate Director)

Project Coordinators:

Brody Bluemel, Delaware State University

Becky Huang, UTSA

Amanda Huensch, University of Pittsburgh

Akiko Imamura, Michigan State University

Stephen Looney, Penn State University

Innhwa Park, West Chester University

Jayoung Song, Penn State University

Zhongfeng Tian, UTSA

Evaluation Panel:

Victoria Hasko, University of Georgia

Luke Plonsky, Northern Arizona University

The Penn State Workshops in Research Methods for Applied Linguists started in 2020 as a means to support researchers in designing, carrying out, and reporting research studies. Our aims for these workshops have always been to provide free and accessible training in a variety of research methods used in the field, including considerations for research design, data collection, data analysis, reporting, and interpretation. Our workshops involve all stages of the research process and are led by international experts. In fall 2022, we are pleased to offer the following workshops, taking place on Friday afternoons (2:00pm – 5:00pm). Registration is free and participation is via Zoom.

• Ethics and Narrative Inquiry: Methodological Considerations, Peter De Costa, Michigan State University, September 9, 2022

• Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition Research, Kimberly Geeselin, Indiana University, September 23, 2022

• Longitudinal Research in Applied Linguistics, Nicole Tracy-Ventura, West Virginia University, October 7, 2022

• Research Methods for the Study of Language Aptitude, Shaofeng Li, Florida State University, October 28, 2022

• Integrating Corpus- and Genre-Based Approaches to Academic Writing Research and Pedagogy, Xiaofei Lu, Penn State University, November 11, 2022

For more information about these workshops and to register, please visit https://sites.psu.edu/researchmethods/

The African Studies Global Virtual Forum, led by Professor Sinfree Makoni (African Studies & Applied Linguistics) has its own website, which is now live. Visit the site to find out more about scheduled events, forum speakers and the Forum's book series. http://gvf.la.psu.edu

We are pleased to announce that two of our doctoral students won prizes at the 37th Graduate Exhibition for their research in applied linguistics. Shuyuan Liu won second prize in the category "Arts and Humanities" and Tianfang Sally Wang won second prize in the category "Social and Behavioral Sciences". Our congratulations to both of our doctoral students!