2023 NFMLTA-NCOLCTL Graduate Research Support Grant Recipients
Amr Rabie-Ahmed
Michigan State University
I am truly honored and thrilled to receive the 2023 NFMLTANCOLCTL research grant. I believe the opportunities NFMLTA and NCOLCTL create for researchers like me contribute immensely to the fields of Second Language Acquisition and language learning. My dissertation research focuses on the effects of using translanguaging practices by Arabic heritage learners in Modern Standard Arabic classroom, and the mobilization of social identity in class. With the support of this grant, I will be able to conduct my study and contribute meaningful and beneficial implications to our field.
Angelina Rubina
University of South Carolina
I am concurrently a Comparative Literature MA student and a Linguistics PhD candidate at the University of South Carolina. My research interests focus on second language acquisition, language teaching, and 20th century Russian literature. My dissertation project compares how native speakers of English and Englishdominant heritage speakers of Russian acquire the Russian language (through classroom instruction) and process Russian sentences. I am honored to receive the 2023 NFMLTANCOLCTL Research Award and believe that this grant will help me contribute to our understanding of the nature of human linguistic competence.
Keiji Iwamoto
Indiana University
I am a PhD student in the Department of Second Language Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. In my university, I teach Japanese at East Asian Languages and Cultures and Summer Language Workshop. My research interest is L2 phonetics and phonology and their implications to pronunciation teaching. The current project tries to identify exactly where L1 Mandarin learners of Japanese have perceptual difficulty in Japanese voicing contrast. I am truly honored to receive the 2023 NFMLTANCOLCTL Research Award and share my research with other language educators all over the world
WeiHsuan Lo
University of Northern Colorado
I am a Ph.D. student in the Technology, Innovation, and Pedagogy Program at the University of Northern Colorado. I am also an experienced Chinese language Instructor with a Master’s degree in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language from the National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan. I’m passionate about exploring the intersection between language learning and educational technology. It is a great honor to receive this year’s NFMLTA/NCOLCTL Graduate Research Award supporting my doctoral dissertation research. My dissertation involves designing an educational card game that promotes language development and problem-solving skills. This grant will help me tremendously with data collection and analysis, contributing to valuable foreign language learning experiences through gameplay.
Hunter Brakovec
Indiana University
I am greatly honored to receive the 2023 NFMLTA-NCOLCTL graduate research award, which will support data collection for my dissertation on the third language (L3) acquisition of Korean, Mandarin, and Russian. I am a PhD candidate in the Second Language Studies department at Indiana University. My research interests center on the effects of an adult’s previously acquired languages in the acquisition of an L3. In my dissertation, I examine these effects at three levels: at initial exposure (prebeginner), at the end of the initial stages (late-beginner), and throughout further development (intermediate and advanced).
Thong Vang
University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Nyob zoo hab ua tsaug! My name is Thong Vang and I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. I am honored to have been considered and awarded the 2023 NFMLTANCOLCTL Research Grant. My research focuses on language and culture, particularly in the HMoob community in the United States. The funding from this award will help me with the initial data collection phase as I hope to record and archive the voices of community elders and their stories for their families and future kin. Once more, I am grateful and I look forward to sharing my research at future conferences!
Wei William Zhou
Ohio State University
I am honored to receive the NFMLTA/NCOLCTL Graduate Student Research Supports Grant. My sincere thanks go to NFMLTA and NCOLCTL for providing me with the opportunity to advance my research on Mandarin Chinese as an L2. My project will examine the impact of orthography on L2 word recognition and lexical access in Mandarin Chinese, and how it interacts with other linguistic aspects such as phonology in L2 acquisition and processing. Through this research, I hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex mechanisms involved in Mandarin Chinese acquisition and offer fresh insights into L2 Chinese teaching and learning. I am thankful for this recognition and for NFMLTA/NCOLCTL’s dedication to promoting language education and scholarship
Rossina Soyan
Carnegie Mellon University
I am very happy to get support from NCOLTCL/NFMLTA. I am a PhD student at the Department of Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. My research interests include biliteracy development, in particular, reading and writing development in first and second languages. My dissertation project focuses on the connection between morphological awareness and lexical inferencing in L2 Russian. The overall goal guiding the project is to help Russian learners become independent readers and to understand how various reading subskills contribute to this process. This award will allow me to reach out to more participants and to contribute to the science of reading.
Kaidi Chen
University of Connecticut
Kaidi Chen is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies in the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut. He is also a member in the UConn Laboratory for Spoken Language Processing, a student in the Certificate Program of UConn Cognitive Science, and affiliated to the Connecticut Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science. His broad research interests are on bilingualism/second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and language pedagogy. In recent years he mainly works on speech perception, second language speech and open science. He is also an experienced language teacher passionate about real-world pedagogical innovations. With the support of this award/grant, he will investigate the influence of semantic context, fundamental frequency (F0), and background noise on Mandarin spoken word recognition in American learners of Mandarin with different proficiency levels.
Matthew Ajibade
Indiana University
I am thrilled and deeply honored to receive the 2023 NFMLTANCOLCTL research grant in support of my dissertation research. I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington. My research focuses on the influence of language background and exposure on Yoruba heritage and second language learners’ phonological perception. The recent increase in the enrolment of heritage and L2 learners has posed a challenge to many LCTLs, especially those with a mixture of both groups, such as Yoruba. Thanks to this grant, my research will be able to help Yoruba instructors better understand how to address specific phonological needs of heritage and L2 learners of the language.
Bianca Brown
Carnegie Mellon University
I am a PhD student in Second Language Acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University. My research interests focus on the development of multilingual identity in study abroad, and what kinds of social networks and interactions support that identity. The NCOLCTL grant will help me follow study abroad students of Turkish in an intensive program this summer, which will be a distinct opportunity to contribute to the learning and teaching of Turkish, as well as diversify study abroad perspectives often situated within more commonly taught languages. I am honored and grateful for the support of the NFMLTA-NCOLTL community.
Hanyu Jia
The University of Arizona
English