Idée Edalatishams Has Won a Language Learning Dissertation Grant

The Language Learning Dissertation Grant is a $2,000 award aimed at facilitating the research work of doctoral candidates in the language sciences. The grant is awarded to the top-10 applicants twice a year, based on the strength of their research design and its relevance to ongoing research in the language sciences and their potential to make meaningful contributions to current and future research, among other criteria. The list of awardees is published in the September issue of the journal every year. She will use this award to assist in the development of a Corpus of Teaching Assistant Classroom Speech (CoTACS). Her dissertation focuses on the role of intonation in marking new/given information in the discourse of native and non-native English speaking TAs. The corpus includes classroom speech by TAs from different L1 and disciplinary backgrounds teaching a range of college-level courses and will be annotated with prosodic features such as prominence and pauses. It will eventually become available for public use, enabling teaching and research on many aspects of TA speech.