Welcome back, SLAT community! Come catch up after the long summer! All new SLAT students, continuing SLAT students, SLAT faculty, SLAT alumni, and SLAT visiting scholars are welcome.

This short event will give the new SLAT students the chance to meet their new faculty mentors. Welcome to our new cohort!

The University of Arizona Graduate Center is hosting this year's New Graduate Student Orientation. This event is open to all new doctoral and masters students at the UofA and will be held on Thursday, August 21st, in the Student Union Memorial Center (SUMC) - 3rd floor Grand Ballroom. International students should check in by 8:30 am and domestic students should check in by 9:30 am; the event will last until 2:00 pm. 

Students should register as soon as possible through Grad Start, and must have their NetID before they can access the registration form. 

For questions about the orientation, please email info@grad.arizona.edu. 

Dissertation title: Corpus-based Pedagogy in Undergraduate L2 Writing Courses: Effectiveness, Engagement and Instructors' Understanding

Dissertation Committee: Dr. Shelley Staples (Chair), Dr. Jonathon Reinhardt, Dr. Christine Tardy

Dissertation Abstract: Corpus-based pedagogy, or data-driven learning (DDL), aims to use large collections of real-world language examples to support students in analyzing language patterns and variations in authentic contexts, guiding them to inductively discover target language features, and developing their language awareness and knowledge (Friginal, 2018; O’Keeffe & McCarthy, 2010; Poole, 2022; Reppen, 2010). Recent studies found that corpus-based pedagogy has been increasingly adopted in writing education across different areas (Boulton & Cobb, 2017; Boulton & Vyatkina, 2021; Chen & Flowerdew, 2018). While professional and published-text corpora have been widely applied in corpus-based writing courses, the value of learner corpora is often overlooked in current writing instruction, despite the fact that they can provide more accessible and non-threatening texts that better align with genres students are expected to write (Seidlhofer, 2002). 

The three studies of the dissertation are centered around implementing corpus-based activities created using a learner corpus Corpus & Repository of Writing (Crow) (Staples & Dilger, 2018-), to enhance L2 students’ writing skills in first-year writing courses. Employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, students’ drafts, surveys from both students and instructors, semi-structured interviews, and teacher reflections were collected and analyzed. Article one explores the effectiveness of integrating texts and data derived from the learner corpus Crow in teaching evaluative language (evaluative adjectives and modal verbs) in an academic writing project. To make corpus-based pedagogy more engaging for students, Article two extends to integrating game elements, introducing a series of gamified corpus-based materials and investigating the students’ and instructors’ perceptions as well as addressing the benefits of gamifying corpus-based materials in their L2 writing classes. Finally, Article three examines non-specialist instructors’ understanding and perceptions of corpus-based pedagogy before, during, and after implementing ready-to-use corpus-based materials in their own teaching contexts. 

Together, the three articles highlight the effectiveness of using learner corpus-based materials in teaching evaluative language, introducing practical strategies for increasing student engagement in corpus-based writing courses, and exploring non-specialist instructors’ evolving understanding of corpus-based pedagogy throughout their first implementation. The dissertation contributes to addressing the pedagogical applications of learner corpora and offers insights for designing effective, engaging, and accessible corpus-based activities for L2 writing contexts.

Dissertation title: Corpus-based Materials Implementation in Writing Classrooms: Teachers' Experiences, Perceptions, and Training Initiatives 

Dissertation committee: Dr. Shelley Staples (Chair), Dr. Jon Reinhardt, Dr. Christine Tardy, Dr. Gail Shuck (Special Committee Member - Boise State University)

Dissertation abstract: Corpus linguistics has transformed language education by enabling teachers and learners to engage directly with authentic language data. Data-driven learning (DDL), also known as the direct use of corpora in language teaching (DDL; Johns, 1991), supports second language writing (SLW) instruction by fostering genre awareness and rhetorical decision-making (Boulton & Cobb, 2017). While research affirms the benefits of corpus-based instruction, most studies have centered on expert-driven models, limiting insights into how instructors without advanced corpus training learn to adopt these tools (Chambers, 2019). Moreover, many teachers receive little sustained support in integrating corpus methods into their instructional contexts (Farr, 2008; Poole, 2022). This dissertation investigates how teachers learn to design and implement corpus-based pedagogy in SLW instruction. Organized as a three-article study, it addresses gaps in teacher training, corpus-based materials design and implementation, and long-term engagement with DDL. Article 1 presents a systematic review of 33 empirical studies, identifying trends and gaps in DDL teacher education. Article 2 analyzes classroom data from 14 instructors implementing ready-made corpus-based materials, using the TPACK framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) to explore pedagogical decision-making. Article 3 examines a 10-week collaborative workshop in which 6 in-service SLW instructors engaged in co-design, peer feedback, and reflective dialogue around corpus pedagogy, highlighting how collaboration support teacher learning of corpus-based instruction. Together, these studies offer a multi-dimensional view of DDL integration and propose practical, collaborative, and context-responsive approaches to help teachers meaningfully incorporate corpus tools into SLW pedagogy.

This will be a private defense. Please email GIDP-SLAT@arizona.edu with any questions.