Dr. Shelley Staples, Dr. Bruna Sommer Farias, Dr. Aleks Novikov, Dr. Mariana Centanin Bertho
Panelists: Dr. Shelley Staples (University of Arizona), Dr. Bruna Sommer Farias (Michigan State University), Dr. Aleksey Novikov (Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center), Dr. Mariana Centanin Bertho (Yale University)
Moderator: Sara Matsumura (SLAT 2nd year student)
This webinar is proudly co-sponsored by the SLAT Program and the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL).
Panelist Bios
Dr. Shelley Staples is a Professor of English/Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at University of Arizona. Her research focuses on corpus-based analysis and corpus-informed instruction using learner corpora. Her work can be found in journals such as Applied Linguistics, English for Specific Purposes Journal, International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, Journal of Second Language Writing, Modern Language Journal, and TESOL Quarterly. She is the PI of the Multilingual Corpus of Assignments: Writing and Speech (MACAWS): http://macaws.corporaproject.org. She is also the PI of the Corpus and Repository of Writing (Crow): http://crow.corporaproject.org.
Dr. Bruna Sommer-Farias is an Assistant Professor of World Language Teaching at Michigan State University. She holds a PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the University of Arizona. She teaches graduate-level classes for world language teachers with focus on language concepts, teaching methods, biliteracy and interculturality. Involved in the Portuguese MACAWS project since its inception, she currently uses MACAWS materials to teach teachers about data-driven learning and teaching with learner corpora.
Dr. Aleks Novikov is an Educational Measurement Specialist in the Language Testing Directorate at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, with over 10 years of experience teaching Russian as a foreign language. He holds a PhD in SLAT from the University of Arizona. His background spans language instruction, corpus linguistics, data analysis, AI, and assessment.
Dr. Mariana Centanin Bertho is a Lector of Portuguese at Yale University. She completed her Ph.D. in SLAT in 2024, with a dissertation on the phonological acquisition of Portuguese by English-Spanish bilinguals, using learner corpus data. Since 2019, she has been part of the MACAWS team, working on both written and spoken corpus development as well as pedagogical applications of corpora, including the creation of teaching materials and resources.
