Department of Applied Linguistics and ESL at GSU

08/21/2026

A big, warm welcome to our new MA and PhD students! It was great to meet you all at the new student orientation this morning, and we look forward to having you join the AL family and working with you over the coming semesters! 

08/13/2026

We are thrilled to see Ph.D. Student Sak Lee featured in the GSU News Hub! Sak was awarded the prestigious Young Students Graduate Research Fellowship, which recognizes his innovative research in language assessment for young learners. Congratulations, Sak!
https://news.gsu.edu/2026/08/11/georgia-state-ph-d-student-awarded-prestigious-ets-fellowship/

The 12-month fellowship will support Sak Lee's research on language assessment for young learners.

08/03/2026

Another busy faculty member checks in! Dr. John Dylan Burton, faculty in the Department of Applied Linguistics and ESL, spent this past week in Santiago, Chile, leading the Winter Seminar in Language Assessment at Universidad Alberto Hurtado.

Over five days, Dr. Burton worked with 26 EFL teacher educators from across Chile on core areas of language assessment literacy, including rating scale development, analyzing test data, and the practical decisions teachers face around testing in their own classrooms.

The seminar was co-organized with Salomé Villa Larenas and supported by the ILTA/Duolingo Collaboration, Outreach, and Professional Development Grant, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, and Chile's Ministry of Education through the English Open Doors Program.

07/28/2026

Exciting news for AL PhD candidate Soyeon Sim, who has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 DSLL (Digital Studies in Language and Literature) Research Grant in Linguistics. The DSLL Research Grant aims to support doctoral students and early-career researchers engaged in interdisciplinary studies at the intersection of language, literature, and technology. Congratulations, Soyeon!!

07/22/2026

Our faculty are starting to return from their summer adventures! Our Intensive English Program (IEP) Lecturer, Sharon Santmyer, recently served as an English Language Specialist in Colombia through the U.S. Department of State's English Language Specialist Program.

Through her project, Smart Strategies for Resource-Limited English Learning in Caldas, Sharon collaborated with English language teachers and teacher trainers across the region by leading workshops, conducting classroom observations, and facilitating other professional development events.

07/18/2026

A happy GSU reunion in sunny Spain! This week Dr. Ute Römer-Barron and her former PhD advisee Dr. Selahattin Yılmaz both participated in the 17th Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC) conference in Jarandilla de La Vera and got to catch up six years after Selahattin graduated from the AL PhD program! Selahattin presented a paper on some of his current research, while Ute gave one of the invited plenary talks. Congratulations, both!

07/14/2026

Congratulations to Dr. Yali Feng, who successfully defended her dissertation this morning! The title of Dr. Feng's dissertation is Rater Effects in Assessing Oral Production of L2 Chinese Pragmatic Performance: The Influence of Teaching Experience and Teaching Context. Her committee consisted of Dr. Sara Cushing (chair), Dr. YouJin Kim, Dr. Dylan Burton, and Dr. Shuai Li.

07/14/2026

Ph.D. students Yiwen Zheng and Jini Jung along with Dr. Daniel Dixon had a great time at the CALICO 2026 conference at Miami University in Oxford, OH! Their research presentations included the following:

Yiwen Zheng: Can GenAI Write Appropriate Abstracts? A Comparative Analysis of GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, and Human-Authored Abstracts

Jini Jung: Purpose-Specific Affordances of GenAI: Academic Writing vs. Conversational Practice

Daniel Dixon: From Tasks to Quests: Evaluating, Evolving, and Gamifying a Task-Based GenAI Platform for L2 Development

07/10/2026

Congratulations to PhD student Dayoung Joo and Dr. Ute Römer-Barron on their new research article, just out in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics! Their study uses a cross-sectional learner corpus to examine effects of task condition and proficiency on syntactic complexity in learner speech.

While task effects on L2 speaking have been examined from a task-based language teaching (TBLT) perspective, learner corpus research may offer a broader view of learner production and help address th...