Conference Summary
The American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2008 Annual Convention
March 29 to April 1, 2008, Washington, DC

Rong Liu
PhD Candidate
Second Language Acquisition and Teaching GIDP

The Herbert E. Carter Travel Award allowed me to attend the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) 2008 Annual Convention, held in Washington, DC. The conference is one of the most prestigious conferences in the field of second language acquisition. Based on the number of scholars and the quality of the papers, it certainly deserves the reputation.

I presented part of my dissertation at the conference. My project is on the effectiveness of teaching English grammar by processing instruction. I was able to introduce to the audience my findings of the project and directly related it to the current classroom teaching methods such as presentation, practice and production (the PPP teaching method). My presentation sparked an engaging discussion during the ten minute question-answer session. Their questions helped me to locate areas that need to be clarified or issues to be further explained. For example, one scholar asked me why I used the online methods in my study. I noticed that not many educators have realized the advantages of those methods. It is important to explain in great detail those methods so that more and more scholars will adopt the paradigm. One scholar in the audience actually commented that he would like to use the method to extend his dissertation project.

I also attended many interesting presentations and colloquiums at the conference. Most of them were thought-provoking. Two professors from Southern Illinois University presented their study about how second language learners used grammar to interpret reflexives. The topic is similar to mine but they examined it from a different perspective. After their presentation, I was able to talk to them about their research and found that we share the same interest, i.e., using psycholinguistic methods to study language leaning. Their findings are consistent with my research. Another memorable presentation was from Nan Jiang, who graduated from our program. Jiang and his colleagues conducted a very interesting study about second language morphological processing. I have always been interested in second language morphological studies. The method they were using was new and the proposal they made about language processing could inspire my discussion in my paper.

In sum, attending the AAAL conference contributed to my development as a junior language scholar. It is one of the best conferences that I have ever been to. I learned the most recent advances in our field and interacted with both fellow graduate students and experience professors whose feedback and advice I find to be valuable to my academic advancement. I am extremely grateful for the financial support of the Herbert E. Carter Travel Award. Without the award, I could not have made it.