Summer 2025 competition:
SLA core faculty are invited to submit applications for summer research support that would involve an SLA student project assistant. The purpose of this small grant program is to support SLA faculty research and to provide SLA students with the opportunity to work with faculty on some aspect of a research project: SLA students gain research experience while faculty are provided with research assistance.
To apply: SLA faculty should send the following to SLA program coordinator Jana Martin by 12:00 pm, April 1, 2025:
- a short paragraph that describes the research project
- the graduate student(s) with whom you will be working (if known)
- the approximate number of hours needed
Students will be paid as hourly project assistantships (PAs) at the hourly rate for PAs. In 2025, the program has funding to support a total of approximately 50 hours of PA hourly support.
Funding for this small grant program is through the Language Institute. We are pleased to have supported 30 summer research projects from 2015-24.
Summer 2024 Awards
Jacee Cho and Lidia Gault
Research addressing L2 acquisition of Russian motion verbs by L1-English and L1-Korean speakers, including implementation of project survey test items on Qualtrics, recruitment and testing of participants, and working on data entry and organization for analysis.
Julia Goetze and Martiniano Etchart
Supporting ACTFL Grant study by conducting follow-up interviews with the study’s survey respondents.
Diego Román with Angela Lake (C&I)
Research on perceptions of teachers of multilingual Latinx students in rural Wisconsin, focusing on the analysis of interviews that were conducted with teachers and administrators from three rural school districts in the state.
Previous Awards
2023
Julia Goetze and Patricia Haberkorn
Development and piloting of a survey rating scale for a survey-based project that investigates two cognitive processes hypothesized to regulate FL teachers’ emotion.
2022
Cathy Stafford and Martiniano Etchart
Research addressing the role of emotions and sense of belonging among Wisconsin Latino individuals, including review of audio recordings/selection for analysis; coding and analysis; and literature review.
Heather Willis Allen and Mathilde Garnier
Research related to a monograph proposal on multiliteracies in L2 education (Routledge). Assisting with updating literature review.
Maggie Hawkins with Eric Ho and Gordon West
Research addressing neo-nationalism, including literature review, interviews, and data transcription and analysis.
Mariana Pacheco, with Scott Stillar and Rebecca Sawyer
Research addressing racialization of Chicano+ students, including gathering information, data analysis, writing, and editing.
2020
Cathy Stafford and Jose Luis Garrido Rivera
Research addressing how Spanish-English bilinguals use a variety of linguistic resources to situate personal narratives in time, including corpus analysis, literature review and drafting and revising the article manuscript.
Maggie Hawkins and Eric Ho
Literature review on controversial issues/discussions in education relating to Global StoryBridges; review of website data (videos and chats) to locate where controversial issues surface and through what means and modalities; conducting interviews with site facilitators at international sites (virtually); and beginning conference proposals and manuscript preparation.
Mariana Pacheco and Scott Stillar
Literature review of empirical studies that have analyzed the processes by which K-12 Latina/o/x bilingual students are racialized within and through educational structures and policies shaped by racist ideologies and discourses.
2019
Heather Allen and Sandra Descourtis
French high school and collegiate French instructors’ practices and perspectives on L2 writing
2018
Kate Vieira and Tim Cavnar
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
KD Thompson and Sara Farsiu
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
Maggie Hawkins and Gordon West
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
Jacee Cho and Amy Clay
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
Cathy Stafford and Ryan Goble
Mid-aged Latinas/Latinos in the US Midwest cultivating sustained bilingualism through figured worlds of advocacy and career advancement
Mariana Pacheco and Colleen Hamilton
Analysis of a study on translanguaging practices in a third-grade classroom
Gail Prasad and Colleen Hamilton
Multilingualism in schools
KD Thompson and Kazeem Sanuth
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
Jacee Cho and Amy Clay
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)
Heather Willis Allen and Lauren Goodspeed
Investigating high-leverage teaching practices among experienced teaching assistants
KD Thompson and Kathryn Mara (Department of African Cultural Studies)
Social media discussions of online communities of progressive Muslims
Richard Young and Chen Sun
History in Person: Moments of Language Teaching in the Personal Histories of Teachers
Francois Tochon and Snezhana Zheltoukhova
Implementing internet technologies for deep language learning to inform policy makers on ways to increase language learner autonomy
2015
Jacee Cho and Amy Clay
Korean, Russian, and Spanish speakers’ semantic judgments on different types of definite noun phrases in L2-English
Heather Willis Allen and Lauren Goodspeed
Evaluating student perceptions and learning outcomes in French courses
Richard Young and Sandrine Pell
Reading French theorists Bourdieu and Foucault in the original
Jacee Cho and Glenn Starr (Department of English)
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
Maggie Hawkins and Bingjie Zheng
Language in Ugandan education