Rachel LaMance's Conference Summary

     Rachel La Mance
     Ph.D. Student
     Second Language Acquisition & Teaching GIDP

     Conference Summary
     Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) 2019 Convention
     Atlanta, GA, USA

I received the Herbert E. Carter Travel Award to attend the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) 2019 Convention. Attending this practitioner-focused conference was valuable for me as I finish writing my dissertation on academic literacy development in undergraduates. I attended this conference directly after attending the American Association for Applied Linguistics conference, which is more research oriented. Seeing the contrasting focus of presentations at these two conferences, as well as the types of audience questions at both of my presentations, helped me consider the implications of my dissertation project from both research and pedagogical perspectives. Since TESOL is so rooted in concrete pedagogical concerns, I was pushed to consider the real-world implications of my findings and how they could help undergraduates more effectively navigate university environments. TESOL also served as a reminder that the research we do at universities and the knowledge we take for granted doesn't always smoothly extend outward to other educational contexts.

Attending other sessions related to academic literacy at TESOL allowed me to emerge from my dissertation bubble and see how other researchers approached the same topic. Though we are all interested in investigating the same broader issue, each of us has different specific foci and methods of investigation. Seeing these different approaches has helped put my project in perspective as I situate my own dissertation with regard to other research in the field.