Fall 2019 SPLS News Round-Up
Presentations
Virginia David presented at the Canadian Association for Applied Linguistics Conference at the University of British Columbia in early June. The title of the presentation was "“Ombretto. I don’t know in English how to say”: Using Conversation Analysis to investigate L1 use as a communication strategy."
Elizabeth Isidro, E. and M. Hernandez were invited to present a talk on Parents as teachers: Behavioral skills training and parent literacy at the 4th Annual Adult Literacy Research and Training Symposium held in Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, December 12, 2018.
Drs. Selena Protacio, Susan Piazza and Virginia David presented research from their grant titled Project English Learners and Teacher Education (ELATE) at the 31st Annual Ethnographic & Qualitative Research Conference (EQRC) in Las Vegas, NV in February 2019. The title of their presentation was Teachers' Perspectives in Engaging English Learners’ Parents and Families and focused on graduate students’ family and community engagement action plans that were created in class and then implemented in each of their schools.
LS and TESOL faculty members, Susan Piazza, Selena Protacio and Virginia David, shared a research presentation titled, “Family Engagement Strategies Across Language and Culture” at the 2019 Summer Literacy Conference: Literacy and the Whole Child sponsored by the Georgia Department of Education in Macon, GA on July 10. They presented current findings from a federally funded study titled Project English Learners and Teacher Education (ELATE), which supports in-service teachers in their efforts to increase family and community engagement, specifically targeting English learners. Two presentation sessions allowed WMU researchers to interact with educators, administrators and other faculty from across the state of Georgia.
Magda Tigchelaar, presented a paper titled “Can-Do Statements for Spoken Proficiency: Factors and Scaling to the ACTFL (2012) Proficiency Model.” And at the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Atlanta, GA.
Magda Tigchelaar presented a paper titled “Examining the Structure, Scale, and Instructor Perceptions of the ACTFL Can-Do Statements for Spoken Proficiency.” at the Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC) in Atlanta, GA.
Publications
Kate LaLonde is a co-author on the article - Training Front-Line Employees to Conduct Visual Analysis Using a Clinical Decision-Making Model in the Journal of Behavior Education.
Elizabeth Isidro published a study titled: Transactions in design-based research for designing curriculum: A self-study in the journal Reflective Practice.
Dr. Selena Protacio published her article, "How positioning affects English learners' social interactions around reading" in the latest issue of Theory into Practice. Meanwhile, another article entitled, "Motivation matters: Factors that affect the reading motivation for English learners" was published in the Michigan Reading Journal.
Magda Tigchelaar’s book chapter titled - Exploring the Relationship Between Self-Assessments and OPIc Ratings of Oral Proficiency in French was published in the edited volume Foreign Language Proficiency in Higher Education.
Magda Tigchelaar co-authored a paper accepted in Studies in Second Language Acquisition. The title of the article is "How knowledgeable are SLA researchers about basic statistics? Data from North America and Europe."