Applied Linguistics Spring 22 Colloquium

Event Date: 

Thursday, May 26, 2022 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm

Event Date Details: 

Zoom Meeting

 

Event Location: 

  • Zoom meeting
  • Colloquium

Please join us for our Applied Linguistics Spring Colloquium featuring two of our own students: Jing Yu, Ph.D Candidate (School of Education, UCSB) and Dr. Alexandra López-Vera (California University of Science and Medicine)

Jing Yu, Ph.D. Candidate

Education, UCSB

The Racial Learning of Chinese International Students in the US:

A Transnational Perspective

This study examines how Chinese international students develop a complex understanding of race and racism from a transnational perspective. Through semi-structured interviews and follow-up exchanges with 20 Chinese international undergraduates at a US public research university, the article argues that students’ racial learning was jointly shaped by their upbringing in mainland China and by racial encounters in the US. The findings reveal that Chinese students held contrastive views on race and racism before and after their arrival, due to the disjuncture between ideological impact in the home country and experiential exploration in the host country. Specifically, Chinese students’ lived experiences in the US dramatically shifted their conceptualization of race from a nationality-based identity to the phenotype-based imposed category of ‘Asian.’ They also revised their understanding of racist practices from mostly violent and explicit to mostly subtle and implicit. The study contributes to the broader literature on transnational racialization.

Alexandra López-Vera, Ph.D.

California University of Science and Medicine

Implicit Instruction of Direct and Indirect Object Pronouns in Spanish through Technology- Mediated Task-Based Language Teaching
 
The present study sought to examine the effects of an online Task-Based Language Teaching module on the acquisition of direct and indirect object pronouns in Spanish. These grammatical structures are used very frequently by native Spanish speakers, but are less used by Spanish learners because of their difficulty. The main problem is that object clitics in Spanish normally create a structure that appears to be (Subject)-Object-Verb. The results of this study demonstrate the benefits of using an online Task-Based Language Teaching module specially designed for the acquisition of direct and indirect object pronouns in Spanish. Participants in the study used the target structures on many occasions, and their results manifest the effectiveness of technology-mediated TBLT in the acquisition of target grammar structures.