Congratulations to our Spring 2026 SLS Graduates!

Y’all did the thing! We’re so proud of all that each of you have accomplished and can’t wait to see the impact you’ll make in the world! Now it’s time to celebrate — you’ve earned it!

Sharing pictures that were taken at the Spring 2026 Commencement held on May 16, 2026.

Ìę

The post Congratulations SLS Spring 2026 Graduates! appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Hoʻomaikaʻi to all the Spring 2026 graduates!

On Thursday, May 7th, SLSSA organized a graduation cooler to celebrate all the graduates in our program. Mahalo nui loa to SLSSA for the event and everyone’s hard work this semester!

Missed the cooler? Donʻt worry! This Saturday, May 16th, come celebrate our graduates in the morning commencement ceremony then followed by the lei reception at the baseball field.

More Photos from the Event:

The post Spring 2026 Grad Cooler Hosted by SLSSA appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

We are happy to share that Ayano Kawasaki, a PhD candidate in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, has recently published an article, “Bridging the research–pedagogy gap: ESL teachers’ beliefs about L2 fluency and fluency-enhancing classroom practices,” in Language Teaching Research.

This article originated from her second qualifying paper and examines teachers’ beliefs about fluency and fluency-enhancing activities, as well as the extent to which these beliefs are reflected in their classroom practices. The study offers important insights into the need for teacher training that promotes a more nuanced understanding of fluency and the effective implementation of fluency-focused activities.

Read the article here:Ìę

Congratulations again, Ayano, on this outstanding achievement!

The post PhD Student Ayano Kawasaki Published in Language Teaching Research appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Students in SLS 130, led by instructor Anne McCarrey and assisted by the Sato Center (Dr. Christina Higgins, Kent Sakoda, Gisella Kahapea), hosted “Bumbai You Learn,” a Pidgin outreach event on April 23, 2024 at Campus Center.

The event featured quizzes and activities with Pidgin (Hawaii Creole English), with participants receiving T-shirts upon completing the event’s activities. Over 200 people stopped by to learn more about Pidgin!

The post SLS 130 hosts Pidgin outreach event appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Join us for one of our Virtual Open House and Info Sessions! Meet professors and students, and learn more about the MA in SLS!

Register for Tuesday, November 14 at 9am Hawaii Standard Time:

Register for Friday, November 17 at 3pm Hawaii Standard Time:

The post Virtual Open House & Info Session appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Hawaii TESOL (February 19)

• Chang, Choe, Holden, & Isbell – Practical Concerns with a Local Intensive English Program’s Rubric Revision (paper presentation)
• Gilliland & Munoz Galleguillos – Reflection on Teaching and Assessing Grammar in Chilean EFL (paper presentation)
• Miller, Bachus, and Ishiyama – Utilizing Online Corpus Tools for Academic English Word Knowledge Construction (workshop)

Language Testing Research Colloquium (March 7-11)

• Isbell, Crowther, & Nishizawa – Speaking performances, stakeholder perceptions, and scores: Extrapolating from the Duolingo English Test to the university (paper presentation)
• Nishizawa – Fairness of an operational academic English listening test featuring non-standard accent inputs (paper presentation)

American Association of Applied Linguistics (March 19-22)

• Crowther, Isbell, & Nishizawa – What characterizes ‘acceptable’ academic English speaking? Examining task and linguistic/temporal influences on university stakeholders’ judgmentsÌę(poster)
• DeVore – Development of Syntactic Complexity in early learners of Mandarin: From prototypes to analyzed constructions (paper presentation)
• Gilliland, Kunkel, Qayyum, Larkin, Lee, & Suzuki – Teacher-Student Group Conferences in Online Writing Courses: Conference Talk, Textual Revision, and Student Attitudes (colloquium)
• Isbell, Lee, Jang – Linguistic and temporal influences on L2 Korean accentedness and comprehensibility (paper presentation)
• Ishiyama –Ìę“Native Check” Requirement and EAL Doctoral Students’ Writing ProcessesÌę(paper presentation)
• Kunkel & Gilliland – Language teacher-researchers: Negotiating the boundary between knowledge creator and knowledge consumer (paper presentation)
• Nguyen & Higgins – Toward a Hawaiian Place of Learning: International Students’ Perspectives (paper presentation)
• Nishizawa, H. – The factor structure of an English listening test featuring non-standard accents (paper presentation)
• Polio, Vashti, DeVore, & Malone – Distinguishing language use among OPI proficiency levels by learners of Mandarin

TESOL International Convention and English Language Expo (March 22-25)

• Chang, Choe, & Holden – Examining Rater Effects on ESL Placement Essays Using Rasch Analyses (paper presentation)
• Crowther, Gilliland, & Isbell – Assessing pre-service language teachers’ oral communication: A rubric development projectÌę(poster)
• Gilliland – Contextualizing General Concepts: Best Practices for Virtual MOOC Camps (poster)
• Gilliland, Kunkel, Qayyum, Larkin, Lee, & Suzuki – Lessons Learned from “Zooming” into Teacher-student Group Writing Conferences (panel)
• Kunkel & Gilliland – Onions, Twisters, and Field Trips: (Re)conceptualizing Action Research via Metaphor (paper presentation)

The 35th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (March 24-26)

• Zhu & GrĂŒter – Can structural priming support L2 learning of the Mandarin dative alternation? (poster)

Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (May 12-14)

• Zhu & GrĂŒter – Does priming lead to learning? It depends on what you mean by learning (poster)

Psychology of Language Learning Conference (June 23-25)

• Crowther – Insight from task complexity on global speech production

The post Upcoming conference presentations appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

All are welcome at next Tuesday’s virtual graduate school fair.

The educational panel session will be from 9:00 to 10:30 am. Please click the link below to join the webinar: (passcode: 408695)

After the panel session, the department’s Graduate Chair and Program Specialist will be available to chat with any prospective applicants during the virtual booths from 10:30 am to 12:00 pm HST!

To join us during the virtual booths, please visit and enter sls as the passcode.

We look forward to meeting you!

The post <span class="entry-title-primary">Virtual Graduate Student Fair on Tuesday, November 16</span><span class="entry-subtitle">9:00 am to 12:00 pm HST</span> appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Zoom meeting link:

Passcode: sls

Title: Using analytic rubrics to support second language writing development in online tasks

Abstract:

With the accelerated move to online learning, writing skills have become increasingly important for managing digital genres, such as educational blogs and discussion forums. Although effective written communication via such media is important for student success, many university-level second language learners navigate these unfamiliar tasks without access to guidelines concerning content, structure, and language use. Researchers in Applied Linguistics have suggested communicating teacher expectations through descriptive rubrics (Crusan, 2010; Ferris & Hedgcock, 2014; Weigle, 2002), and this dissertation investigates the effects of sharing an analytic rubric on learners’ written development.

The first phase of this sequential mixed-methods research involved the expert review of academic blog posts written by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Quantitative and qualitative data gathered during the review led to the identification of five categories around which learners’ written performance was assessed, including (a) genre-specific features (i.e., use of hyperlinks), (b) task fulfillment and relevancy, (c) content, (d) organization and balance, and (e) language use. On the resulting analytic rubric, each category was assessed on a 1- to 6-point scale. In Phase II, six raters used the rubric to score the posts written by 163 EFL learners. A many-facets Rasch analysis revealed that the rubric categories were functioning appropriately; however, the raters were not using the full 6-point scale.

In the final phase, written data from the blog entries of 31 learners were collected over two years, with 15 participants having access to the revised (4-point) rubric. After data collection, raters who were unaware of the order of composition scored three posts per participant according to the revised scale. A two-way repeated measures analysis of variance showed that the presence of the rubric, time, and the interaction of the rubric and time had a significant positive impact on average scores (p < 0.001). Participants’ longitudinal written development was also analyzed via nine linguistic indices covering lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, and syntactic complexity. The mean values for two variables, noun-adjective and verb-direct object dependency bigrams, demonstrated a significant change over time, while the moving-average type-token ratio (MATTR) and lexical decision time contributed to a regression model predicting 16% of variance in language use scores. A subsequent rhetorical moves analysis revealed a sequence of optimal steps for constructing an academic blog post. The results of this study are of use to pedagogues and researchers interested in digital genres, technology-mediated tasks, and second language writing assessment.

The post PhD in SLS Dissertation Defense on Friday, October 29 at 11:00 pm HST appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

The auction raised over $1,800, which will go directly to our department’s scholarship funds, such as the Elizabeth Carr Holmes Scholarship and Ruth Crymes Memorial Grant.

Below is a picture taken at this year’s retreat:

The post SLSSA Annual Retreat 2021 appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Zoom meeting link:

Passcode: sls

Title: Towards Critical Literacy in Korean High School EFL Classrooms: Narrative Inquiry of Teacher Emotions and Critical Materials

Abstract: This dissertation explores the emotional landscapes of two Korean EFL high school teachers as they begin to incorporate critical literacy practices into their regular high school EFL instruction. Critical literacy focuses on the connection between literacy and power by giving literacy a socio-political dimension (Janks, 2010, 2013). Language teachers are encouraged to help their students achieve a deeper understanding of texts by discussing how power dynamics are inscribed in everyday life, engaging in active analysis of the text, and offering strategies for uncovering the underlying messages within texts (Luke, 2012). In the critical classroom, language teachers are no longer the sole source of authority or knowledge, and students take on the role of active agents who co-construct knowledge with their peers and teachers to transform their reality in a way that allows them to read both the ‘word’ and the ‘world’ (Freire & Macedo, 1987). This learning process is indispensable for cultivating mature democratic citizens who have creative and critical minds endowed with the profound empathy to change both their own lives and the world around them.

Attempting to use critical literacy materials, however, can pose a number of challenges for teachers in Korean EFL high schools given the country’s test-oriented and top-down educational system. For successful implementation of critical literacy in this context, it is important to develop an understanding of teacher emotions because knowing how teachers feel is essential to understanding their teacher identities and instructional practices (Benesch, 2012; Zembylas, 2013). To investigate teacher emotions, I draw on a narrative inquiry framework and triangulate data from longitudinal teacher narratives (collected before, during, and after the implementation of critical materials), audio-recorded classroom interactions (collected over the course of a semester), and official school documents.

The findings show that the teachers experienced a range of emotions, both positive and negative. While they initially reported having negative emotions such as resistance, uncertainty, lack of confidence, and even bodily discomfort (e.g., ‘sweat on the back’), these negative emotions were changed into positive ones through emotional engagement with critical literacy practices as the teachers co-constructed knowledge with their students. The teachers used critical literacy as a mediation tool to overcome the dissonance between their personal beliefs and their teaching practices, which in turn led to the formation of renewed, empowered, and legitimate teacher identities. This study provides teacher narratives and descriptions of classroom-based interactions for use in critical language teacher education, a discussion of pedagogical implications for critical materials development, and recommendations for a paradigm shift towards critical literacy in test-oriented Korean high school EFL classrooms and similar contexts.

The post <span class="entry-title-primary">PhD in SLS Dissertation Defense on Friday, May 14 at 1:00 pm HST</span><span class="entry-subtitle">Hyeyoung Jung</span> appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.