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The American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) is a professional organization of scholars who are interested in and actively contribute to the multi-disciplinary field of applied linguistics. AAAL members promote principled approaches to language-related concerns, including language education, acquisition and loss, bilingualism, discourse analysis, literacy, rhetoric and stylistics, language for special purposes, psycholinguistics, second and foreign language pedagogy, language assessment, and language policy and planning. --- AAAL Official Website
This year Dr. Kim had two paper presentations at the AAAL conference. We as undergraduate students got to be a part of one of the presentations, a paper about three middle school bilingual students doing a capstone project in which they created digital stories. This is the second time we presented data from this project at the AAAL, but this year we took a different angle and used a different framework. It was great for me to work on the study from the early field observations to the conference presentations, especially this year's AAAL presentation that explored different dimensions of the data. The project has given me a deeper understanding of how to conduct qualitative research. The conference itself was in Atlanta, where the weather was much nicer than Boston in mid-March. We went to sessions according to our different interests, had great food together, and had a great time at the conference -- once again.
Yi:
“When I was taking the AP Psychology class in high school, there was a poster saying you need to “surround yourself with who you want to be.” I think academic conferences are an excellent opportunity to surround ourselves with senior scholars in the field whose work we are interested in and to figure out what we would like to pursue in the future. It has been a great honor for us to present the IDEAS project with Dr. Kim and Dean Wortham. We got the chance to articualte our argument while creating the slides for the presentation. Although it was 8 in the morning, there were still a lot of people in the audience, and some of them raised questions that were perfectly aligned with our future research directions. It motivated us to continue our current research, and hopefully we can find some additional interesting results.“
Yinru:
“This year’s AAAL conference was in the sunny and warm Atlanta. This is my second time participating in the AAAL conference as a co-presenter. It is an absolute honor to be able to come back again. Before the presentation, I went to several sessions including a poster session, presentations and receptions. It was so much fun to talk to some graduate students and even undergrads like us who were presenting, and to exchanging experiences and information. They all had awesome ideas and cool projects, and I was really happy to have some great conversations with them. During our presentation, we did a role play to represent three participants in the case studies. Since we have devoted much time and energy to analyzing each case, it is always meaningful when we get to present it to other scholars. The quality of the questions that were raised was amazing, and one audience member really asked a million dollar question that went straight to the point regarding our data collection method. After the presentation, we decided to take full advantage of this trip and went to the zoo to see pandas. Overall, it was an amazing experience of learning, making connections and having fun together. I’m super grateful for this opportunity.”