Elena Cotos

  • Associate Professor
  • Associate Dean-Graduate College

Contact

ecotos@iastate.edu

515-294-1958

1137l Pearson
505 Morrill Rd.
Ames IA
50011-2103

Bio

Courses I am teaching

  • ENGL/LING 2190: Introduction to Linguistics
  • ENGL/LING 5270: Discourse Analysis
  • ENGL/LING 5280: English for Specific Purposes
  • GRST 5290: Preparing Publishable Thesis Chapters
  • ENGL/LING 6300: Applications of Natural Language Processing

Research areas

English for specific purposes, corpus-based genre analysis, genre-based writing pedagogy, automated writing evaluation, computer-assisted language learning and assessment.

About my teaching

I embraced teaching almost twenty-five years ago, and it has been a meaningful and substantial part of my experience ever since. Striving to be a worthy representative of the teaching profession, my first and foremost goal is to promote active student learning through effective pedagogy. Therefore, I am a teacher who does research, and a researcher who teaches. Classroom contexts serve as the bedrock of the research I do, providing elucidative evidence about the approaches I choose and the materials I develop in order to soundly attend to my students’ specific needs.

Current research

My credo as an applied linguist stems from the word “applied,” and thus my research agenda is focused on empirical inquiries driven by applied purposes. As a linguist, I am fascinated by the ways in which language functions in intricate ways to convey meaning. Therefore, my current projects center on identifying language problems related to functional meaning, devising theoretically-grounded technological solutions, and empirically validating their use in ways that have direct implications for pedagogical action in LSP contexts.

Education

PhD, Applied Linguistics and Technology, Iowa State University, 2010

Selected Publications

  • Cotos, E. (in progress). Technology-enhanced move analysis: Methodological advances in genre studies. Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series, Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
  • Kruse, O., Rapp, K., Anson, C. M., Benetos, K., Cotos, E., Devitt, A., & Shibani, A. (Eds.). (2023). Digital writing technologies: Impact on theory, research, and practice in higher education. Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Digital writing technologies: Impact on theory, research, and practice in higher education.
  • Cotos, E. (2023). Corpus-based knowledge framework analysis: A deliberation of methodology and outcomes. In T. Slater (Ed.), Social practices in higher education: A knowledge framework approach to linguistic research and teaching (pp. 36–73). Equinox.
  • Cotos, E., Huffman, S., & Link, S. (2020). Understanding graduate writers’ interaction with and impact of RWT during revision. Journal of Writing Research, 12(1), 187–232.
  • Cotos, E. (2014). Genre-based automated writing evaluation for L2 research writing: From design to evaluation and enhancement. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.