Graduate

Melike Akay
Melike received her BA from Bogazici (Bosphorus) University and completed her MA in Foreign Language Education. Melike has experience teaching EFL courses at the university level, as well as working as a research assistant in the Department of ELT in Turkey. Her research interests include pragmalinguistics, digital discourse analysis, and multimodal communication.
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Khalid Alghamdi
Prior to joining the LALS program in 2019, Khalid had earned two master’s degrees: one in business administration from Alfaisal University, Saudi Arabia, and the other in linguistics from Ball State University, IN. Khalid has experince teaching EFL at the university level. His research interests include business discourse, pragmatics in SLA, and language attitude.
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Nafla Alshahrani
Nafla received her MA in Applied Linguistics from Southern Illinois University. She is a lecturer in English department at Jazan University, Saudi Arabia. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, culture, discourse analysis, and SLA.
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Kübra Çekmegeli
Kübra earned her bachelor's degree in English Language Teaching (ELT) from Hacettepe University in Ankara in 2018. After completing her bachelor's degree, Kübra taught English at the post-secondary level for two years. Prior to joining the LALS program, Kübra received her master's degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from Teachers College, Columbia University in 2022. Her research interests are classroom discourse, conversation analysis, L2 interaction, and language teacher education.
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Zakaria Fahmi
Zakaria joined the LALS program in Fall 2019 after receiving his Mater's degree in Liberal Arts from Middle Tennessee State University. Zakaria has been teaching ESL, French, and Arabic in various settings. He is interested in the discursive formations of language in education, media, and society, language ideologies, multilingualism, language contact, corpus linguistics, and ELF.
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Tania Ferronato
Tania received her MA in Linguistics from the University of Padua, Italy, and she was a Fulbright FLTA scholar in 2020. She has previous experience in teaching ESL and Italian as a foreign language. Her research interests include Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, L2 phonology, and CALL.
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Jihye Kim
Jihye received her MA in English Linguistics from Hannam University in South Korea. She has experience as a Teaching and Research Assistant at Hannam University and ACCESSS (Academic Center for Corpus-based English Studies and Statistical Solutions). Her research interests include social issues that can be examined through linguistic research.
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Francesca Marino
Prior to joining the LALS program in 2021, Francesca Marino received her M.A. in Languages and Intercultural Communication in the Euro-Mediterranean Area in 2018 from the University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy. Her research interests include Multimodal Discourse, Sociolinguistics, and Discursive Identity Construction (particularly sexual and gender identity).
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Yuxuan Mu
Before joining in the LALS program, Yuxuan Mu received his MA in Applied Linguistics from University College London in 2021. His research interests include translanguaging, language and social media, and identity studies.
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Benjamin Puterbaugh
Benjamin received his BA from Oberlin College and his MA in Spanish from Middlebury College. His research explores the links between language and social identities, especially in relation to race and socio-economic class. He is particularly interested in critical approaches in Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis.  His research also focuses on Spanish and Haitian Creole.
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Juan M. Rostrán Valle
Juan received his BA in TEFL from Universidad Centroamericana (Nicaragua) and his MA in TESOL from the SIT-Graduate Institute in Vermont. He has experience teaching EFL/ESL and Spanish in different academic settings, both in the USA and Nicaragua. His research interests include second language teaching methodology, L2 writing, and error treatment in the L2 classroom.
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María José Torres Centurion
María received her MA in TESOL from Kent State University and her MA in Linguistics from Ball State University. She has experience teaching EFL in Argentina. She has also taught ESL and Spanish classes at the university-level in the United States. Her research interests include bilingualism and direct applications of translanguaging in the classroom.
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Luoxiangyu Zhang
Prior to joining the LALS program, Xiangyu received her MA in TESOL from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Xiangyu's research areas fall broadly into sociolinguistics, gender studies, and how these topics are reflected in online discourse and pedagogical materials.
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