26th Annual Graduate Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, and TESOL Symposium
About this event
Hosted by the Department of English at Arizona State University, the 26th Annual Graduate Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, and TESOL Symposium showcases graduate student research on topics such as applied linguistics, bilingual education, CALL, discourse analysis, EFL/ESL/ESP, emotional labor, forensic linguistics, historical linguistics, language documentation, language and identity, language revitalization, morphology, narrative analysis/inquiry, non-native English speaking teachers (NNEST), phonetics & phonology, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, second language writing, semantics, sociolinguistics, syntax, teacher development, TESOL, theoretical linguistics, and world Englishes.
The keynote speaker is Suhanthie Motha of the University of Washington on "Entering the Fields of Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, and TESOL with an Antiracist and Decolonizing Ethic: Dreams and Possibilities.”
Motha describes how graduate students entering the fields of linguistics, applied linguistics, and TESOL in the contemporary moment encounter an entirely different disciplinary space than did their scholarly predecessors. The contours of language-related disciplines have been shifting dramatically within a global context that itself has been undergoing significant change. Increasing recognition of the interconnectedness of race, migration and mobility, language, and capital has meant that for linguists, applied linguists, and TESOLers, meanings of language studies have also been transformed.
Graduate students today are stepping into a discipline embedded in histories of conquest, racial violence, and domination, and practicing in a contemporary context of inequitable global racial power and forms of knowledge production and transmission that are steeped in colonial reasoning. These enduring legacies are indelibly but invisibly woven throughout our language practices, pedagogies, research methods, relationships, and the academic, social, and institutional spaces we are immersed in, as well as our imaginaries of what counts as valuable and legitimate.
Motha invites you to think alongside her as she wonders how to approach her craft in a way that is clear-sighted about the injuries and damages of colonialism and racial inequity. Drawing particularly on examples from language teaching contexts, she asks: Are linguistics, applied linguistics, and TESOL irretrievably rooted in an ontology of race and empire? Or is an antiracist and decolonizing applied linguistics possible?
The symposium is free of charge but registration is requested.
Additional sponsors include ASU's School of International Letters and Cultures, School of Social Transformation, School of Transborder Studies, and Interdisciplinary Committee on Linguistics, as well as Regents Professor Elly van Gelderen.
Download symposium schedule: 
26th_annual_graduate_lal-tesol_symposium_schedule.pdf