Blog

At SSLW 2019, I presented three talks: a single authored classroom practice based one about transitional genres in professional writing, results from the transculturation project with my collaborators Phuong Tran and Parva Panahi, and an interactive workshop with the Crow team. My three presentations were well attended, and the audience provided helpful feedback that would push my work forward. Through my interactions, I met new scholars and made new connections. The SSLW community is a friendly and supportive crowd, and every year I participate in the conference I make new friends.

A heartfelt ‘thank you’ to Paul Kei Matsuda and all his students who always do an outstanding job in organizing the conference and bringing the L2 scholarly community together from different spots in the United States and all over the world. I am looking forward to SSLW 2020 (June 18-21) in Istanbul, Turkey and the Bali, Indonesia 2020 sequel (Dec. 12-14).

With Bradley Dilger, I attended the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ annual conference in Baltimore, Maryland, and conducted a workshop to introduce the Crow platform and its various uses to the CWPA audience. During the workshop, I met several WPAs with whom I discussed the potentiality of using Crow for professional development and research at their institutions. I had an interesting discussion with a writing program administrator from University of Louisville about using corpus texts and pedagogical materials from Crow to mentor incoming graduate student instructors on rubric design. For more information about the workshop, click here to have access to the slide deck and digital handout.

The Crow Team recently held a research summit at the University of Arizona in Tucson from Oct. 18 to Oct. 20, 2017. Faculty and students from Purdue and South Carolina gathered for two days, with Crow researchers joining from West Lafayette and Michigan as well. I participated with graduate researchers Adriana Picoral and Ashley Velázquez in this summit.

What I found most helpful was witnessing the power of rhetorical listening as a prerequisite skill for successful collaboration. We closely observed how the team leaders were giving chances to each other, to us as graduate students, to undergraduate students, to potential collaborators, and to institutional staff to talk and express various points of view. They were generously and attentively listening to figure out what takeaways would most help Crow grow and prosper in terms of data collection, site expansion, research methodologies, best infrastructure practices, interface prototyping and development, and winning grants.