Resources for:
  • Current Students
  • Faculty & Staff
  • Alumni
  • Directory
  • News
  • Events
UCI School of Education
  • About Us
    • Dean's Welcome
    • Our Mission & Vision
    • Facts & Information
    • Climate Council
    • Maps & Directions
  • Academics
    • Ph.D. in Education
    • MAT + Credential
    • Undergraduate
  • Community Engagement
    • Overview
    • Teacher Academy >
      • California Reading & Literature Project
      • UCI CalTeach
      • UCI History Project
      • UCI Math Project
      • UCI Science Project
      • UCI Writing Project
    • Orange County Educational Advancement Network
    • Center for Educational Partnerships >
      • SAGE Scholars Program
      • COSMOS
      • California Alliance for Minority Participation
    • Center for Research on Teacher Development and Professional Practice
  • Faculty
    • Our Faculty
    • Faculty Interviews
    • Centers
    • publications
  • Giving

Doctoral student presents research at two national conferences in March

3/4/2021

 
Third-year doctoral student Undarmaa Maamuujav is presenting her research at two virtual conferences this March: the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2021 conference, March 20-23; and the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) 2021 International Convention and English Language Expo, March 24-27.

AAAL promotes scholarship in language education, acquisition and loss, bilingualism, discourse analysis, literacy, rhetoric and stylistics, language for special purposes, psycholinguistics, second and foreign language pedagogy, language assessment, and language policy and planning. The title of Maamuujav’s AAAL presentation is “Syntactic and Lexical Features of Adolescent L2 Students' Essays: What Do Their Essays Tell Us?”
 
TESOL is dedicated to advancing excellence in English language teaching. The title of Maamuujav’s TESOL presentation is “The Utility of Infographics: Scaffolding L2 Students' Writing Development.”
Picture
Maamuujav’s research interests include writing and rhetoric, critical reading, genre analysis, academic writing, composition, second language writing and acquisition, and technology in writing and literacy development. Currently, she is working on two major research projects. Under the guidance of her advisor, Professor Emerita Carol Booth Olson, Maamuujav is a graduate researcher on a U.S. Department of Education grant to scale cognitive strategies instruction to writing and professional development in eight states (Arizona, California, Illinois, Minnesota, Nevada, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin). Under Associate Professor Penelope Collins, Maamuujav is serving as a co-researcher on a UCI Education Research Initiative to investigate the utility and effectiveness of infographics to scaffold undergraduate students’ writing skills development in process-based writing courses.

Maamuujav received a 2020 Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program (CDIP) appointment from the California State University Office of the Chancellor in support of her goal to become a tenure-track professor at a California State University. She is specializing in Teaching, Learning and Educational Improvement (TLEI).
 
Conference Abstracts
 
AAAL (American Association of Applied Linguistics) 2021 Virtual Conference
AAAL Individual Paper Presentation Title: Syntactic and Lexical Features of Adolescent L2 Students' Essays: What Do Their Essays Tell Us?
 
Abstract: The Common Core State Standards have placed a premium on academic writing, requiring students to develop academic language proficiency and analytical writing skills as early as 6th grade. However, only about 27% of students nationwide and an alarming 1% of English learners perform at a proficient level (NAEP, 2011). To be college ready, students must demonstrate “the ability to analyze and interpret challenging texts and to write about those texts using academic discourse” (Olson et al., 2015, p. 5). We posit that higher order analytical writing skills require a higher level of linguistic competence. Based on this premise, this preliminary study seeks to examine linguistic features of text-based, analytical essays (n=86) written by 7th through 12th grade L2 students from a public school in California. Specifically, we analyze the syntactic and lexical features of L2 students' texts using systemic functional approach to examine how these features reflect their level of academic language proficiency. We also seek to identify the linguistic challenges adolescent L2 writers have in common when writing academic essays. Three broad conceptual frameworks of writing and literacy development inform our study: the academic English conceptual framework; a socio-cognitive perspective of writing, and systemic functional linguistics. Qualitative sentence coding and quantitative measures of selected linguistic features provided by Coh-Metrix were employed to determine language patterns. Our findings reveal that sentence boundary issues, lack of syntactic variety, the underuse of sophisticated coordination and subordination to create complex connections between ideas, and lack of academic and advanced vocabulary are major linguistic challenges adolescent L2 students encounter. Our findings have important pedagogical implications. Based on our findings, we argue that academic language can be explicitly and effectively taught to meet the linguistic needs of this student population and explore ways to incorporate explicit academic language instruction in English Language Arts Curriculum.
 
TESOL 2021 International Convention and English Language Expo
TESOL Research-oriented Presentation Title: The Utility of Infographics: Scaffolding L2 Students' Writing Development
 
Abstract: This presentation highlights a pedagogical integration of infographics as a digital and procedural tool to scaffold writing development. Substituting the first draft with an infographic assignment will reduce teachers' load of responding to multiple full-text drafts and facilitate feedback that targets higher-order writing issues in the early stages of writing. This presentation reports on the pedagogy and the research of integrating infographics in a writing class that uses process-based approach.

Comments are closed.
Quick Links:

Fall 2021 Magazine
​Faculty & Research
Faculty Interviews
Directory
Admissions
​Giving
​News Center
Employment
Programs:
​
PhD in Education
MAT
Major in Edu Science
Minor in Edu Studies
CalTeach
CASE
Resources for:
​

​Current Students​
Faculty & Staff
University of California, Irvine
School of Education
401 E. Peltason Drive
Suite 3200
Irvine, CA  92617
(949) 824-8073

Picture
© ​2022 UC Regents 
  • About Us
    • Dean's Welcome
    • Our Mission & Vision
    • Facts & Information
    • Climate Council
    • Maps & Directions
  • Academics
    • Ph.D. in Education
    • MAT + Credential
    • Undergraduate
  • Community Engagement
    • Overview
    • Teacher Academy >
      • California Reading & Literature Project
      • UCI CalTeach
      • UCI History Project
      • UCI Math Project
      • UCI Science Project
      • UCI Writing Project
    • Orange County Educational Advancement Network
    • Center for Educational Partnerships >
      • SAGE Scholars Program
      • COSMOS
      • California Alliance for Minority Participation
    • Center for Research on Teacher Development and Professional Practice
  • Faculty
    • Our Faculty
    • Faculty Interviews
    • Centers
    • publications
  • Giving
  • Resources For:
  • Future Students
  • Current Students
  • Faculty & Staff

  • Search This Site
  • Directory
  • News
  • Events