2022-2023 Event Planning Sub-Committee

Kyungjin Hwang (she/her/hers) is a PhD candidate in Language and Literacy at the University of South Carolina. Kyungjin is a former English teacher at middle and high schools in South Korea, and currently teaches Korean language to Korean immigrant children at a community-based Korean language school in the U.S. She particularly makes an effort to devise and implement methods to allow Korean heritage bilingual children to use their semiotic and linguistic resources for their creative and critical meaning-making. She also works as an executive assistant at the Bilingualism Matters Center @ UofSC, which supports research and events to promote awareness about bilingualism. Her primary research interests include Heritage Language Maintenance, Dynamic Bilingualism, Multimodal Translanguaging Pedagogy, Language Ideology, and English as a Second or Foreign Language. She can be reached at khwang@email.sc.edu.

John Wayne N. dela Cruz is a PhD student in Educational Studies - Language Acquisition at McGill University. John’s research examines plurilingualism in the context of language education and Canadian mono/bilingual policies, and he is particularly interested in the plurilingual practices and identities of immigrants learning the official English and French languages as additional languages. His research interests stem from being a Filipino immigrant to Canada, and from being a plurilingual language learner himself. Outside of research, John organizes GradTalks—a speaker series for and by graduate students— for McGill’s Plurilingual Lab, and works as a teacher: he has taught ESL using plurilingual pedagogies to francophone Canadian learners at various levels, as well as an undergraduate course for pre-service ESL teachers. Feel free to reach out to him at john.delacruz@mail.mcgill.ca.

Yadi Zhang is a Ph.D. student in the Teaching and Curriculum Program at the University of Rochester. Her research interest is centered around technology applications that effectively mediate EFL/ESL language learning, with a particular focus on digital literacy and EFL/ESL online teaching. Yadi holds an MA degree in TESOL from the University of Rochester along with a New York State online teaching certificate, Evaluation Program Certificate, and a BA degree in English Education from Capital Normal University in Beijing, China. She has taught the English language to students of various ages for seven years in both public and private institutions. Currently, she works as a research assistant and teaching assistant at the University of Rochester in New York. As an international student and educational professional, her teaching is informed by the idea that every student is unique. Yadi is committed to ensuring every student should have equal access to educational resources.  She can be reached at yzh237@u.rochester.edu

Insil Jeon (she/her) is a PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction at University of Minnesota. She is a former elementary school teacher in Seoul, South Korea. During that time, she closely worked with immigrant students and their families, developing her professional expertise in practice-driven bilingual education. She’s now working with student teachers at UMN, and continues to expand her areas of interest including: Language ideology, Raciolinguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis. Her current research project takes on a raciolinguistic purview in focusing on immigrant students’ racialization experiences. She can be contacted at: jeon0099@umn.edu