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.
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