Featured Scholar: January 2023

What are you watching/streaming?
Over the summer, we got to watch quite some Japanese animation films by Hayao Miyazaki with my five-year-old son. Some of our favorites are Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and the Secret World of Arrietty.  

What games are you playing?
 Hmm…I am not playing any games. I like to walk and hike. One of my favorite places to go for a walk in Lubbock is the Memorial Arboretum. I enjoy visiting the place to see how the different plants grow (or go dormant). It gives me nice surprises every time that I go there—a new plant that I've never seen before, wildflowers, or little animals. 

What are you listening to?
I enjoy listening to podcasts. I regularly listen to Hidden Brain and How I Built This when I exercise in the morning. On my way to work, I've been listening to nostalgic pop music from the 90s or 2000s. 

What are you reading?
 I just finished the four books of the Neapolitan Novels. They were on my list for a while, but it was not until recently that I found time to read them. While I was reading them, I was amazed, from time to time, by how powerful good writing can be. There were pages that I liked so much that I re-read them multiple times and felt the writing provided inspiration for my own writing even though what I write (i.e., research articles) has little in common with novels.

What are you writing/thinking about?
 I'm working on two articles on very different topics. One is about the role of people's first languages in their learning of second or foreign languages. The other article focuses on describing an emerging academic genre in the field of applied linguistics called OASIS summaries from a linguistic perspective. These are summaries of language studies that are written in non-technical language and intended to be intellectually accessible to non-researchers in the field. I am interested in finding out how they are different from abstracts of academic journal articles from a linguistic perspective.