L2TReC Research Assistant Presents at 2024 AAAL Conference
Title: Corpus Linguistics as a Source to Determine Constraints in Pronoun Drop: Analyzing Learners' Written Spanish
Speaker: Miguel Hernández Alonso
Date: Saturday, March 16, 2024
Location: Houston, Texas
On March 16, in Houston, Texas, L2TReC's Research Assistant, Miguel Hernández Alonso, presented at the 2024 American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference.
Proposal: The study investigates the use of Spanish pronoun drop in students Utah Dual Language Immersion schools. This is done comparing data from the CUDLI corpus, consisting of written samples by learners in different grades. The project aims to find out if there are substantial differences across grades in the ratio of pronoun drop vs. overuse. Also, it intends to examine syntactic and morphological features related to the cases of pronoun drop, to determine if there are relevant patterns that influence this phenomenon. These findings could improve language teaching by helping educators understand the acquisition of pronouns in L2 Spanish.
Miguel discusses his experience at the conference:
"The project was presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference 2024, that took place in Houston, Texas, between March 16th and 19th. This opportunity to present at one of the most prestigious conferences in the field of Linguistics meant one of the biggest achievements in my career so far, and it was possible thanks to the L2TReC Student Research Grant (awarded March 2023). Not only did it allow me to share my research with other scholars, colleagues, and professionals, but it also contributed to my understanding of how things work in academic circles. I had the opportunity to exchange ideas with fellow graduate students and professors with both similar and very different perspectives of what it means to do research in applied linguistics."
American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL)
Founded in 1977, 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.
Organizationally, AAAL is the United States affiliate of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée, AILA).
