Possible MA Culminating Experiences

Theses
This group would be collaboration with my own research interests
-Understanding the relationship between instructions, instruction giving, and the interpretation of instructions
-The interaction of prosody and gesture in language production and acquisition
-Longitudinal studies of tutor-student (writing or spoken communication) interactions
-Academic/Professional language socialization including socialization into the genres of academic writing, mathematics, or cooking/tasting
  This includes investigating how technology is changing the nature of academic literacy on the PSU campus

Other ideas
-Longitudinal case studies of language learning using the corpus of video recordings from the ESOL Lab School

Such case studies would add to those by Disbrow-Chen, Irvine, Ouellette, Vergun, Kratzer that attempted to trace the development of linguistic or pragmatic features in an individual learner over the course of several terms of study.

One criticism of research on language learning is that much of it takes place in classroom or laboratory settings. Recordings of learners using a language they are learning in other contexts (conversations, service encounters) would be a valuable addition to the field.

-Developing a collection of immigrant-language learner narratives in an audio-recorded format

-Language/Linguistics Awareness: Making connections between Applied Linguistics and the PSU community.
Development of a radio program for the PSU radio station that focuses on language and linguistics

Support for Academic Discourse issues
    One area of applied work that our department does (especially IELP) is language support. ALP and IELP are
    working to help the rest of the university understand language support issues around academic discourse
    that a variety of PSU students need.