Conference Summary
American Association for Corpus Linguistics 2008 Conference (AACL)
March 12-15, 2008, Provo, Utah

Hongmei Wu
PhD Candidate
Second Language Acquisition and Teaching GIDP

I attended the conference of Applied Association for Corpus Linguistics held at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, from March 12-15, 2008. It was truly a gathering of enthusiastic and dedicated corpus linguists from all over the globe. I could not even enumerate all the benefits that I have gained from attending this conference.

Although smaller in the number of sessions and attendees, this conference was nonetheless internationally renowned: it gathered the most influential and celebrated scholars in corpus linguistics from the Great Britain, Australia, and many other countries where the field originated, prospered and continued to lead. Since many leading scholars are based outside the U.S., the opportunities to hear them here in America presenting their own research are invaluable to me. And all of these presentations were nothing but inspiring. The plenary speeches demonstrated not only the current depth and breadth of field but also the ever increasing applications of the corpus tools being developed. The corpus resource workshops featured a rich collection of corpus tools, both free and proprietary, and provided a valuable forum for the designers and users to communicate with each other, discussing the potential uses, pitfalls and further improvements. Attending such conferences is one of the most effective ways to keep abreast with the new developments in the field.

In addition to the plenary sessions and workshops, the concurrent sessions also offered an impressive number of interesting presentations, covering a range of subfields. I wish I could literally split into several entities and attended several of them at one time. I was inspired by the range of practical and technological problems that the presentations dealt with, and more so by their rigorous design, rich research findings, and ingenious solutions. One presentation was especially informative. The research group reported their initial development of a corpus, in which the cohesion and coherence patterns of student writing could be tagged and searched. Although preliminary, the research exhibits enormous promise and points to a viable solution that has challenged the field until recently.

Additionally, I was glad to see many of the scholars that I admired were interested in my topic and offered me very encouraging comments and helpful feedback after my presentation. Although my presentation was just a case study, many people found the story of the participant both representative and unique, and therefore was a worthwhile case to investigate. Dr. Susan Hunston, a name associated with several must-read books for corpus linguistics, provided me with very good suggestions to further my research.

Finally, this is also a conference where I feel I have finally found my community. It is not only because I feel we share the same language, interest, research method, but also because I have literally met my kindred souls, both young and celebrated researchers. I was able to talk about my dissertation ideas, and they offered me invaluable suggestions.

I am very thankful that I had the honor and opportunity to attend this national conference, to present my findings to interested colleagues and scholars, and hear the thought-provoking sessions and plenary talks. For all these, I am indebted to the Herbert E. Carter Travel Award which has made them a reality.

Conference Summary
2008 American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference (AAAL)
March 29-April 1, 2008, Washington, D.C.

Thanks to the financial assistance of the Herbert E. Carter Travel Award, I was able to attend the annual conference of American Association for Applied Linguistics held in Washington D.C., a national conference that attracts hundreds of scholars, junior and senior, in the field of applied linguistics from all over the world. It was an honor to have the opportunity to present my paper entitled “Metadiscourse Awareness in Academic Writing: What ESL Students Seem to Not Know” at this internationally renowned meeting for applied linguists. This conference was truly a rewarding and educational experience for me.

First of all, it was more than inspiring to hear the names that I have read and referenced numerous times in my own research and admired for so long to elaborate on their theories and present their most recent studies in person. The invited colloquium “Redefining the specific in language for specific purposes: Insights from genre theory, corpus linguistics and critical ethnography” featured almost all of the leading scholars in the study of English for Specific Purposes, the very field in which I conducted my research for my presentation at the conference. The three theoretical frameworks, genre theory, corpus linguistics and critical ethnography discussed in the colloquium embodied the entire design of my dissertation. The 3-hour colloquium not only provided an elucidating overview of the development of the field and the state-of-art research but also presented a clear vision of the future directions of research and its critical pedagogical applications.  

Moreover, I was able to present my comparative study of how American students and ESL students employ metadiscourse in their argumentative writing. It was very encouraging to see that my presentation attracted a big group of interested scholars and colleagues. They provided me with very insightful feedback on the design and implications of the study. The whole group also had a very engaging discussion of how ESL learners can be further helped in making skillful use of metadiscourse. Finally, several people came to me after the presentation and expressed their interest in knowing more about the research and exchanged contact information with me. Among them was an editor of a journal of applied linguistics. She not only gave me very helpful suggestions and encouraging comments, but also invited me to submit my paper to the journal.

The current sessions are also very informative and thought-provoking. A wide variety of topics are featured in these sessions, and over 10 sessions presented corpus-based research in ESL student’s writing features. The conference provided a good venue for scholarly exchange of information and social networking among scholars sharing interests in similar research.

Overall, this conference has expanded my horizons and interest in applied linguistics, exposing me to a great number of outstanding presentations.  It has also enhanced my confidence in pursuing my research, knowing that many people are engaged in similar endeavors. Therefore, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Herbert E. Carter Travel Award for making all these opportunities a reality.