ALAA2024

Judit Kormos is a Professor in Second Language Acquisition at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on the cognitive processes involved in learning and using additional languages. She has published widely on the effect of dyslexia on learning additional languages including the book “The Second Language Acquisition Process of Students with Specific Learning Difficulties” (Routledge, 2017). She is also the author of several research papers that have investigated the accessibility of language tests for young learners. She was a key partner in the EU-sponsored Dyslexia for Teachers of English as a Foreign Language and the Comics for Inclusive Language Teaching projects both of which won the British Council’s ELTon award. She is the lead educator of the Dyslexia and Foreign Language Teaching massive open online learning course offered by FutureLearn and has run teacher education workshops and webinars on inclusive language teaching in a large variety of international contexts.

María Cioè-Peña is an assistant professor in the educational linguistics division at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. A former bilingual special education teacher, she studies bilingual children with dis/abilities, their families, and their ability to access multilingual and inclusive learning spaces within public schools. Her interests are deeply rooted in political economy, critical dis/ability awareness, and raciolinguistic perspectives within schools and families. Her work appears in Teachers College Record (2021), Urban Review (2020), Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2022), International Journal of Inclusive Education (2017/2022), Journal of Latinos & Education (2021/2022). Her book, (M)othering Labeled Children: Bilingualism and Disability in the Lives of Latinx Mothers, received the 2023 American Association of Applied Linguistics First Book Award. In 2022, her article “Wanting to Leave; Needing to Stay: Issues for undocumented mothers of children with disabilities” received the Inaugural Outstanding Publication Award from the Council For Exceptional Children’s Division for Culturally & Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Learners. She was also awarded the Early Career Award by AERA’s Bilingual Education Research SIG in 2022. She is a 2023 National Academy of Education-Spencer post-doctoral fellow.

Noriko Iwashita is an Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at The University of Queensland (UQ. At UQ she teaches language assessment and testing, language pedagogy and classroom SLA courses in the master’s program. She supervises PhD and MA students in assessment and classroom SLA. Noriko’s research interests include peer interaction in classroom-based research and classroom assessment, language assessment and SLA interfaces, and task-based language teaching and assessment. She had been involved in several validation projects for speaking assessments funded by ETS, IELTS, and The British Council. In 2018, she co-edited the special issue in Language Testing on Revisiting the Speaking Construct with India Plough (Michigan State University) and Jayanti Banerjee (Trinity College London). She is a President-Elect at ALAA and also served ALTAANZ (Association for Language Testing and Assessment of Australia and New Zealand) as a co-president in 2017-2020 and ILTA (International Language Testing Association) as a nominating committee (2018) and members-at-large (2022-23). Her work has appeared in a co-authored book, edited books, and flagship journals, including Language Testing, Applied Linguistics, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language Learning, The Modern Language Journal, TESOL Quarterly, and Language Teaching Research.
Metro Toronto Convention Centre, late 2004 A convention, in the sense of a meeting, is a gathering of individuals who meet at an arranged place and time in order to discuss or engage in some common interest

Kia ora everyone, I’m really looking forward to our conference this year. As a specialist in Māori-medium education and Māori language revitalisation, I helped to establish the Huarahi Māori-medium Initial Teacher Education program in 1998 to deliver the Huarahi Māori Bachelor of Education (Teaching) degree. With the guidance of kaumātua (elders) who were native speakers of Māori and experienced educators, I wrote all the Reo Māori courses for the degree program to revitalise and normalise the Māori language in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Since its inception, Huarahi Māori program graduates have taught in Kura Kaupapa Māori (pan-tribal schools) and Kura-ā-Iwi (tribal schools). Many also teach in Māori Bilingual and Māori Immersion classes in English-medium schools, while others teach Māori in English-medium secondary schools. I still teach in the program and consider my part in developing and establishing Huarahi Māori as a lifetime achievement for our people, our language, and our culture. I’m also an educational innovator, addicted to the thrill of creating ‘first-of-a-kind’ technologies. I love the feeling of ‘seeing’ a ‘solution’ in my mind’s eye and then the surge of energy to map out the steps in the design process to create the prototype. ‘Creativity’ is defined as the ‘ability to develop original work’, and that certainly describes what I can do and how I created ‘Hika’ the first smartphone (iPhone) app to learn the Māori language and the ‘Māori Mai Me’ app, the first Virtual Reality app to learn Māori. I’m now leading research projects to design and develop avatar and robotic innovations for Māori Sign Language.

Theresa is a Palawa woman of the Truwulway People, and whose Ancestral homelands include Lumaranatana/Cape Portland. She is part of a large well-known family grown by Luna Rrala (strong Aboriginal women) on Tayaritja (islands in Bass Strait), with particular connection to Flinders Island and Truwana/Cape Barren Island.

Theresa is a Senior Indigenous Scholar with UTAS, undertaking a PhD which is a continuation of her decades long linguistic research and analysis (which began in 1997) as Aboriginal Linguistic Consultant with the palawa kani Language Program. From the very beginning of Community discussions regarding the processes required to reawaken a language, the Palawa Community was clear – that although it was a necessity to employ a linguist, an Aboriginal community member must be trained to do the ‘work on the words’. So, Theresa trained for 3 years ‘on-the-job’ with Leo Edwardsson, BA Honours in Linguistics, ANU, and has worked ‘on the words’ since.

Retrieving, reconstructing and reviving ‘language’ words, written down by some 20 recorders from many European nations, including officers of the d’Entrecasteaux Expedition (1793), George Augustus Robinson (1829-34) and Ernest Westlake (1909-10) has been and continues to be the most important work she has undertaken; and her life’s work.

Palawa people of all ages are now writing and performing songs, poetry and speeches in language; translating scripts for feature films (e.g. The Nightingale), as well as providing voiceovers for series such as Little J and Big Cuz, and speaking to and on behalf of Country in their own language. Two editions of the palawa kani Dictionary have been published, with posters, interactive maps and booklets and social media pages exclusively for Community people produced – all to assist the Palawa Community in language acquisition.