Schedule and Abstracts

How does reading in a digital medium affect students’ ability to learn? College classrooms have become digital spaces, but methods of reading instruction are still adapting to the particular demands of the medium. Increasingly, students are required to complete academic assignments using computers, tablets, and phones. When they are left to their own devices, students may struggle with reading. Intentional teaching choices can help students to become better readers. With a review of relevant scholarship, this capstone presentation will offer an approach to teaching digital reading that can mitigate the challenges and amplify the affordances of reading on screens.

The topic of reading has gained widespread attention in the US education system. However, when it comes to First-Year Composition (FYC) classrooms, where an increasing number of multilingual students join their mainstream peers, addressing the reading challenges of these students are seldom discussed in detail. To address this gap, this capstone presentation proposes pedagogical recommendations for FYC instructors who may lack TESOL backgrounds, using the Threshold Concepts (TC) framework. This approach presents a structured way to convey insights to both multilingual students and instructors. 

In 2006, Paul Matsuda, following Horner and Trimbur (2002), wrote an article titled “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. Composition,” calling for greater awareness of the needs of L2 students in mainstream English composition classes in the United States. This project aims to extend Matsuda’s argument in two ways: first, by focusing on reading, a critical component of the success of L2 students in college composition; and second, by taking an approach that starts with first principles and builds an architectonic understanding of how reading works, where it breaks down, and what strategies can be employed to improve it.

Metaphorical language is a tool used in language in order to convey a feeling or image alongside the message being said. Metaphor is oftentimes used in political discourse for the purpose of invoking emotional responses or as a way of simplifying a complex abstract idea into something more concrete and manageable. California’s Proposition 8 is a ruling in 2008 that overturned the ability for same-sex couples to marry. This project sets out to identify which metaphors are used in Proposition 8 discourse to allow for a better understanding of this language tool. 

Many non-traditional students and lifelong learners experience clear barriers to success in community colleges, caused by a lack of assumed technological and digital literacy; thus, it is the responsibility of both educators and college staff to work towards a more equitable system that assists those students in finding success. Through a review of the literature surrounding technological barriers and digital literacy,  alongside a reflection on my personal experience working with a vastly diverse population of students as a tutor and instructional aide during the pandemic, I identify core areas regarding technology where community colleges are losing non-traditional students, what other issues might be compounding on top of this, and what improvements could be made to foster the success of these students.

Short-form video content has become a trend in today’s digital world, especially in popular social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Traditional instructional videos are losing their advantages in language learning classrooms as students’ attention spans are shorter. Short-form videos offer a more concise, focused, and engaging way to deliver information compared to traditional materials, and they are designed to be focused on a single topic and use engaging elements to increase motivation and engagement. This presentation will illustrate the effectiveness and discuss the teaching opportunities that short-form video creates in language learning classrooms.

Instructor feedback within first-year composition courses has experienced a dramatic shift within the last few decades, not only in response to our growing understanding of equity and inclusion in the classroom, but additionally in response to the advent of the Internet. Often absent in these conversations is the voice of the students themselves and their feedback preferences. Using a student-centered approach, in this paper, I argue in favor of a more holistic understanding of feedback. Honoring students’ needs diminishes the inherent power imbalance between instructor and student by instead giving students autonomy over their education. 

This study aims to guide first-year composition instructors in selecting culturally relevant literature (CRL). CRL is literature that reflects students' cultural backgrounds and helps them understand their own culture and that of other students. The guide explains why CRL is necessary for first-year composition courses, how instructors should develop cultural competence, and the importance of community building to gather data on student diversity. The study also presents findings from observations and analysis of student engagement with CRL to show how CRL increase student engagement and graduation rates for students of color, while improving instructors' cultural awareness for better communication and collaboration.

In Arabic, most words are derived from three-letter roots, which hold the meaning of a word. The question of how these roots combine with morphology to make words has been explored thoroughly, but this analysis has been separate from the question of how these transformations productively create proposition-level meaning. This talk will show how Arabic verbal morphology transforms roots and creates systematic participant categories, highlighting various aspects of the base meaning in the root. I will focus on templatic morphology and applying a practical cognitive linguistics approach that combines methods such as Frames and Schemas, Conceptual Integration, and Construction Grammar.

The COVID-19 pandemic and renewed calls to address racism in college writing classrooms led many teachers to experiment with contract grading. This study examines how teachers think through these experiments, and how changes to grading policies affect the written feedback teachers provide students. I find that teachers self-assess the effectiveness of contract grading by reflecting on whether grading contracts enhance or inhibit other pedagogical practices that teachers value highly, which I call litmus practices. Additionally, teachers typically develop "hybrid" forms of grading contracts that and believe that contract grading can create new openings for affective regulation of the writing process.

In my study, I look at the distribution and grammatical function of long in Bislama. Long is a world wide feature in English based creole languages. Bislama is a Creole language and an official language in the South Pacific country of Vanuatu. It has two popular meanings along (accompaniment) and as a multipurpose preposition, depending on the creole. Most studies only look at it semantic meaning, or it’s possible origins. I look to see if it functions like a marker of dative case or something else.

Peer feedback is proved to be a beneficial pedagogical activity in second language writing classrooms (Liu & Hansen Edwards, 2018); however, it is widely researched but seldom used in Chinese EFL writing classrooms (Zhao, 2018). In this Capstone I will review literature on the theoretical framework of peer feedback, namely sociocultural theory (SCT), as well as the benefits, challenges, and limitations of implementing peer feedback in the Chinese context. I will also summarize strategies to overcome the unfavorable factors that hinder the successful implementation of peer feedback in Chinese EFL writing classrooms. It is my hope to promote the use of peer feedback in China so that students can reap maximum benefits from this pedagogical activity. 

From the perspective of Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory and a Communicative Language Teaching methodology, I advocate for the use of "speed dating" as a communicative activity in the language learning classroom. Through the review of existing TESOL literature and reflections on my own practice, I explain how this activity gives learners opportunities to practice and internalize target language through peer interaction, discover their own zones for proximal development, and provides teachers opportunities to assess their students’ understanding. In addition, I will follow up with a brief exploration of the activity’s limitations such as real time assessment of student accuracy.

Every reader learns to engage text both “cognitively” and metacognitively as they advance in literacy, yet these processes are not automatic when it comes to ESL readers grappling with increasingly complex texts.  Our "Digital Age" has compounded the complexity of skills required of these L2 readers as they make the leap into academic English reading in online environments.  What do we know about “traditional” print-based metacognitive reading strategies that can serve these digital academic L2 readers?  And what new forms of metacognition are increasingly required?  In this presentation, I will argue that engaging with “New Literacies” is in fact, a multiple-literacies matter; that intertextual media increasingly requires new forms of engagement, and that much of the metacognitive modeling once offered through class-based scaffolding or on-site librarians assistance has “left the building”, leaving these readers "virtually" stranded, without institutional support. Ideas for meeting these needs are offered.