My PhD is in applied linguistics, with a focus on identity, culture, and literacy as well as technology for instruction and language analysis. I am primarily a qualitative researcher, and I train all of my graduate students in qualitative methods in FLT 815 Culture and FLT 817 Program Development & Administration. Along with the other MAFLT core faculty, we have integrated research methods and ethics into our courses throughout the FLT curriculum.
Given the nature and demands of my position as faculty and program director at MSU, I do not have explicit requirements for research output, but I have developed a research agenda that interweaves with and draws upon my work as a teacher educator. Many of those projects are listed below, and you will see related presentations and other materials in other areas of this site and the MAFLT site:
Research Projects in Progress
Language Teacher Professional Development in K-12 Departments 2023-Present
Primary Investigator with Mary Ellen Rutemeyer. Analysis of teacher development and experiences of onboarding, supervision, curriculum implementation, and advocacy among in-service language teachers, based on written reflections and related materials.
The Program Diaries: Exploring Foreign Language Teacher Collaboration in Context 2020-Present
Primary Investigator – Multi-year project in collaboration with students in FLT 817 Program Development and Administration. Various sub-themes and outcomes. See presentations on Managing Change in Language Programs, Departments of One: How Isolated Language Teachers Connect and Collaborate, Ecology and Vitality of Japanese Foreign Language Programs, and Opening the Silos: Coordinating Planning and PD across Languages. Current focus is on the autonomy-community dialectic in language programs, particularly in times of major change.
Video Annotation, Virtual Community, and Peer Mentoring in the ViVID Project 2022-Present
Co-Primary Investigator with Dr. Bruna Sommer Farias and Dr. Frederick Poole – Needs analysis and analysis of the impact of professional development experiences among instructors of less-commonly-taught languages (LCTLs) who are Fellows in the ViVID Project (see next section), involving interviews, video annotation data, etc.
World Language Teacher Retention Survey 2022-Present
Primary Investigator in collaboration with two Student Investigators, Teryn Henderson and Megan Hinesley, to examine the problem of increasing teacher attrition through a survey of world language teachers who have left the field. Survey to be distributed in 2023.
Virtual Community and Student Support in an Online Graduate Program 2022-Present
Supervising students Betty Brown, Tammy Schmidt, Teryn Henderson, and others and collaborating with Luca Giupponi on program evaluation and autoethnographic reflections. Examining student experience, perceived needs, and goals in relation to MAFLT onboarding, advising, mentoring, course participation, and opportunities for synchronous and asynchronous interaction.
Professional Development Projects
My primary PD project involves running the MAFLT Program at MSU. The following projects have emerged from that work and drawn upon much of the same experience and material.
The ViVID Project: Video-Based Virtual Interaction for Instructors of Less-Commonly-Taught Languages, National LCTL Resource Center | 2022-Present
Project Lead and contributor to instructional design, materials design, community management, recruitment, reporting, and dissemination of results. Federally funded under Title VI grant.
Foreign Language Excellence Exchange (FLEx) Virtual Conference | Biannually 2020 to Present
Organizer and Chair of virtual conference for language teachers, organized in conjunction with graduate students in FLT 817 Program Development and Administration. Twice annually. As of 2022, also contributes to professional development for world language teacher candidates in College of Education in cooperation with Sandhya Shanker.
Methods in 10 Modules for Less-Commonly-Taught Language Instructors 2022-Present
Project Manager, Materials Designer with Rajiv Ranjan – Designing training in pedagogical principles and practices specifically for LCTL instructors, to be offered as open educational resource (OER).
Academic Writing Meta Course for FLT Students 2021-23
Project Lead – Collaborative project with PhD and MA students including Philip Montgomery, Monique Yoder, Betty Brown, Mary Ellen Rutemeyer to develop subject-area and context specific training for participants in FLT courses.
Qualitative Data Analysis for Language Teachers 2014-Present
Designed and continue to maintain training materials in computer-assisted qualitative data analysis for world language teachers, for use in multiple MAFLT courses.
Critical Language Teacher Development, University of North Georgia 2013
Designed and facilitated FLITE (Foreign Language Instructor Training Experience) for instructors preparing for courses in UNG’s intensive summer language program.
University of Baghdad-Georgia State University Linkages Project 2013Teacher Trainer and Materials Designer
Other Projects and Research Interests
My projects may or may not fall under the typical rubric of “research,” but they all involve systematic inquiry into language use, learning, and teaching, with a focus on needs and implications.
These include my dissertation research on investment in young learners of Arabic and many other topics related to teacher cognition, identity construction, and online learning.
- Teacher Cognition and Comprehensible Input
- FL Teacher Research Engagement: Material and Epistemological Barriers and Supports
- Identity Construction and Instructor Presence in Online Communities
- Investment in Family, Community, and Religious Heritage among Learners of Critical Languages
- Inductive Approaches to Grammar and Vocabulary Using Corpus Tools
Latest Posts > Research Projects
Student Projects
Supervising and Collaborating
Also, my students regularly complete action research and ethnographic research projects under my supervision. MAFLT students and alumni have presented work they initiated in my courses at state, regional, and national conferences. In recent years, I have had 25 students or more in my courses completing projects that involve empirical data collection. Each year I supervise 20 or more capstone master’s projects, many of which involve extensive data collection. Many of them do not, however, fall under the traditional rubric of “research,” which has led to my recent interest in teacher inquiry and teacher cognition regarding research.
Past Projects
Projects over the last several years have dealt with the following topics:
- my dissertation on heritage and non-heritage learners of Arabic in a U.S. middle school, which brought up issues of identity, language socialization, literacy, and investment that need to be addressed from multiple angles in multiple papers;
- a study of a fully-online course in which intercultural communication was both the content and the medium led to ethnographic and corpus-informed analyses and papers;
- a collaborative effort with Dustin De Felice and Paula Winke to consider the educational needs and barriers to entry in the field of Arabic language teaching through the experiences of two MAFLT students, now published in The Qualitative Report;
- a project that involved training teachers of critical languages in a summer institute, helping them develop a customized speaking assessment, and studying the motivations of their adolescent learners;
- an action research project with Shannon Spasova, who teaches Russian at MSU, in which we analyzed and enhanced the digital literacy components in her courses, which led to a presentation at CALICO;
- an analysis of the emergence of “culture” and “intercultural competence” as conceptual tools in online learning, using corpus tools to analyze discussions produced in an online course, which has been presented at AAAL; and
- an investigation of teacher cognition and agency in world language teachers, specifically in regard to the growing prevalence of TPRS and comprehensible input as a method that is impacting foreign language teachers and programs all over the country, which has been presented at AAAL.
I have presented on these projects, individually and in partnership with my colleagues, students, and alumni, at national conferences including the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), the National Council for Less-Commonly-Taught Languages (NCOLCTL), the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO), the International Association for Language Learning and Technology (IALLT), and various state and regional conferences.
