The MACAWS Team
Shelley Staples, PI
Shelley Staples (PhD in Applied Linguistics, Northern Arizona University, 2014) is Professor of English Applied Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the use of corpus-based discourse analysis to investigate language use across spoken and written contexts. In addition, her research aims to inform language teaching and assessment, particularly in the areas of English for Academic and Specific Purposes (EAP/ESP). In addition to MACAWS, she is a PI of the Corpus and Repository of Writing (Crow).
Portuguese Corpus
Bruna Sommer-Farias
Bruna is an Assistant Professor at the Master of Arts in Foreign Language Teaching at Michigan State University. She holds a PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the University of Arizona. She teaches graduate-level classes for language teachers with focus on language, writing and corpora, and uses MACAWS materials to teach teachers about DDL and teaching with learner corpora.
Adriana Picoral
Adriana Picoral holds a PhD in applied linguistics and a bachelor's degree in computer science. Her research draws from corpus and computational linguistics to shed light on multilingual language use, acquisition, and development. She has extensive experience in collecting, processing, maintaining, and analyzing language data, both in academic settings and in industry. She is also the founder of R-Ladies Tucson, which is part of a world-wide organization to promote gender diversity in the R community.
Mariana Centanin-Bertho
Mariana is a PhD candidate in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. She is an instructor of Portuguese at the same institution. Her research interests include phonological acquisition of L2/L3, bilingual speech, learner corpora, and data-driven language learning.
Russian Corpus
Aleksey Novikov
Dr. Aleksey Novikov earned his Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) from the University of Arizona. His academic interests include register variation, L2 Russian syntactic and morphological complexity development, corpus-informed pedagogy and Data-driven Learning (DDL), course design, Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) and more generally, usage-based approaches to L2 language learning and teaching in English and Russian.
Valentina Vinokurova
Valentina is a PhD candidate in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. She currently teaches Russian language courses at the same university. Valentina's research interests include translanguaging, embodied learning/communication, technology for language learning, and teacher training and perceptions.
Asya Gorlova
Asya is a PhD Candidate in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include refugee language education, teacher professional learning, critical pedagogies. In MACAWS, she primarily interested in implementation of corpus-based pedagogical materials and teacher preparation.
Chinese Corpus
Yuwei Wang, PI
Yuwei Wang is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Studies. She holds an M.S. in Data Science and focuses her research on L2 Chinese acquisition, particularly the acquisition of Chinese constructions. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, second language acquisition, and the integration of natural language processing (NLP) into language learning studies. She teaches Chinese language courses and has developed a learner corpus from students' assignments to analyze linguistic patterns.
Chen Chen, PI
Chen Chen earned a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics and a master’s degree in Data Science from the University of Arizona. Her research interests include Corpus Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition of Chinese, and Natural Language Processing.
Tianxing Gao
Tianxing Gao is a junior student in the Spanish & Portuguese department. He is a student research assistant in the crow team. His research interest is second language acquisition in Spanish-Chinese.
Yilei Li
Yilei Li is a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. She earned her B.A. from Shandong University and M.A. from Fudan University in China, both focusing on L2 Chinese. Her research interests include the sociocultural approach to second language acquisition, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics (especially syntactic complexity). She teaches elementary and intermediate Chinese at U of A and has experience in study-abroad and immersive language programs.
Spanish Corpus
Julieta Fernández, PI
Julieta Fernández is Associate Professor in the Spanish & Portuguese Department, and a faculty member in the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) at the University of Arizona. Her research seeks to advance our understanding of second language teaching and learning in the at-home and study abroad contexts, with a special focus on pragmatics (the study of language use in social interaction). Prof. Fernández welcomes students who want to work with her on these topics in the Tucson Applied Linguistics Lab. She is involved in MACAWS focusing on Spanish.
Sara Matsumura
Sara Matsumura is a PhD student in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona where she also currently teaches Spanish language courses. Her research interests include instructed second language acquisition, classroom-based research, multimodality, Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), and interactional competence. She is interested in working with the MACAWS to inform and develop the design of classroom materials.
Rosie Ezgur
Rosie Ezgur is a senior working toward her Bachelors of Arts in both Law and Spanish at the University of Arizona, W.A. Franke Honors College. Rosie completed a Spanish language immersion program at the University of Alcalá in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Spain. She is currently the primary researcher for her Honors Thesis project about drug laws, regulations, and cultural perceptions in Spain. She is a Research Assistant for the MACAWS team, helping transcribe language learners’ assignments for the Spanish corpus in the Tucson Applied Linguistics Lab.
Katelyn Reinert
Katelyn Reinert is a freshman student working towards her B.S. in Medical Sciences and B.A. in Spanish at the University of Arizona, W.A. Franke Honors College. She is currently working on the MACAWS research team in the Spanish & Portuguese language department. She seeks to advance her knowledge of linguistics while advancing her Spanish as she transcribes language learners’ assignments.