SLA core faculty are invited to submit proposals for joint summer research projects that would involve an SLA student project assistant and SLA core faculty member. The purpose of this support program is to enhance the connection between SLA faculty and graduate students. Students are provided with research experience while faculty are provided with research assistance.
Ideally proposals will be written jointly by an SLA student and faculty member; however, proposals from a faculty member who has not identified a student partner in advance will be accepted with the understanding that an open job announcement will be made if the project is funded.
Deadline extended: Faculty should submit proposals of 200-250 words to Kristin Dalby, kdalby@wisc.edu, by Wednesday, April 29, 2020. Proposals should include the following:
- a short description of the research project and the tasks that would be assigned to the student assistant
- the number of hours needed
- qualifications/skills required of the student assistant
- prospective outcomes of the project and benefits to the student, which might include a conference presentation or published article or, at the very least, new research skills and perspectives gained
Student positions will be paid as hourly project assistantships at a rate to be announced. In past summers (see below), we have supported projects with student appointments of between 20 and 80 hours.
Second Language Acquisition Summer Research Partnerships give graduate students in SLA and other programs the opportunity to work with experienced researchers and collaborate with faculty to advance their projects. With generous funding from the Language Institute, we are pleased to have supported 18 summer research projects from 2015-2018.
2019
Sandra Descourtis and Heather Allen
French high school and collegiate French instructors’ practices and perspectives on L2 writing
2018
Tim Cavnar and Kate Vieira
An ethnographic study of writing’s potential to develop peace-building capacities in an after-school program for youth whose lives have been touched by violence
Sara Farsiu and Katrina Daly Thompson
Examining how progressive Muslims use different languages to talk about and/or practice Islam, as well as how they use metalanguage to discuss their own and other’s language practices
Gordon West and Maggie Hawkins
Examining existing transnational, translocal and classroom data to develop a methodological approach for analyzing transmodalities-in-practice, to leverage insights from various methodological approaches (e.g., narrative and discourse analysis) to push the current analytical trends in multi/transmodal research
2017
Amy Clay and Jacee Cho
Examining the interaction between different types of adverbs and their placement in a sentence and the mental restrictions that determine whether a sentence is seen as acceptable as a possible English sentence
Ryan Goble and Cathy Stafford
Mid-aged Latinas/Latinos in the US Midwest cultivating sustained bilingualism through figured worlds of advocacy and career advancement
Colleen Hamilton and Mariana Pacheco
Analysis of a study on translanguaging practices in a third-grade classroom
Colleen Hamilton and Gail Prasad
Multilingualism in schools
Kazeem Sanuth and Katrina Daly Thompson
How progressive Muslims use different languages (mainly Arabic and English) to talk about and/or practice Islam, as well as how they use metalanguage to discuss their own and others’ language practices
2016
Amy Clay and Jacee Cho
Investigating the L2 processing mechanism and its role in L2 acquisition by examining the timing (online vs offline) and strategies for integrating pragmatic information when parsing sentences containing the definite article (the) with entities that have not been previously mentioned (referred to as discourse-new definites)
Lauren Goodspeed and Heather Willis Allen
Investigating high-leverage teaching practices among experienced teaching assistants
Kathryn Mara (Department of African Cultural Studies) and Katrina Daly Thompson
Social media discussions of online communities of progressive Muslims
Chen Sun and Richard Young
History in Person: Moments of Language Teaching in the Personal Histories of Teachers
Snezhana Zheltoukhova and Francois Tochon
Implementing internet technologies for deep language learning to inform policy makers on ways to increase language learner autonomy
2015
Amy Clay and Jacee Cho
Korean, Russian, and Spanish speakers’ semantic judgments on different types of definite noun phrases in L2-English
Lauren Goodspeed and Heather Willis Allen
Evaluating student perceptions and learning outcomes in French courses
Sandrine Pell and Richard Young
Reading French theorists Bourdieu and Foucault in the original
Glenn Starr (Department of English) and Jacee Cho
Examining the interaction between different types of adverbs and their placement in a sentence and the mental restrictions that determine whether a sentence is seen as acceptable as a possible English sentence
Bingjie Zheng and Maggie Hawkins
Language in Ugandan education