2023-2024 Social Media Sub-Committee

Myssan Laysy
Myssan Laysy is currently a Lecturer in Writing, Rhetoric, and English for Specific Purposes at University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, as well as a PhD candidate in Composition and Applied Linguistics at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, United States. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in English Language, her minor degree in Mass Communication, and her Master’s Degree in Sociolinguistics from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Besides teaching, Myssan continues to work extensively in corporate training, journalism, copywriting, and English/Arabic translation. Her research interests include ecological influences on teaching and teachers, teacher psychology, critical pedagogy, as well as crisis teaching and learning, among others. In her little free time, Myssan is a community activist and a travel enthusiast. She can be reached at missans@gmail.com

Ayako Hiasa
Ayako is a Ph.D. student in the Linguistics and Applied Linguistics program at Arizona State University. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan. Before joining ASU, she worked for ten years as a K-12 English as a foreign language teacher in Japan. Reflecting on her extensive firsthand teaching experience and through active participation as a presenter in both professional and academic conferences, she has tried to bridge the gap between researcher and practitioner. Her interests include World Englishes, Global Englishes, teaching English as an international language, and antiracist language education. She works on issues surrounding the diversification of the population of foreign English instructors in Japan. One of the major goals of her dissertation study is to bring a new perspective to the field by shedding light on this traditionally ignored population. She is also currently a member of the editorial team for a Japanese high school English textbook published by Suken Publisher.

Minghui Sun
Minghui Sun is a PhD student in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University. She received her bachelor’s degree from Northeast Normal University and master’s degree from Peking University, China. Her areas of interest are language and aging, discourse of death and dying, and translanguaging. In particular, she uses conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and discourse-analytic approaches as methods for data analysis. Her current research focuses on the shared decision-making and agency in small-group meetings among older adults in a continuing care retirement community in State College, Pennsylvania. Driven by her interest in small-group discussions and her own positionality as a speaker of English as a second language, she is also exploring the role of translanguaging in academic communication among multilingual members of a research group using conversation analysis.

Michol Miller
Michol Miller is currently a PhD. student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She has over ten years of expereience teaching English and academic writing both domestically in the US and internationally in Brazil and China. Her primary research interests include critical curriculum and materials development and teacher training for indigenous language revitalization, follow by secondary interests in task-based language teaching, critical pedagogy and cognitive usage-based approaches to second language acquisition. Motivated by her own personal journey of language reclamation as a member of the Hawaiian diaspora, her research focuses on exploring ways that research in second language acquisition can be leveraged to support the language revitalization efforts of language communities around the world.
Member Testimonials
"Being a part of AAAL GSC has been a great experience for me since I feel a sense of belonging. AAAL GSC members are helping the AAAL grad student community by providing helpful resources and interacting with students via multiple platforms. This has taught me a lot about how to build a community and how to serve an academic community as an aspiring professional researcher."
- Yunjung (Eunice) Nam
"During the 2017-2018 academic year, I was a member of the GSC social media sub-committee. As a social media sub-committee member, I was able to connect with other graduate students in the field. Additionally, I acquired various skills that I was able to use in my future service endeavors. For members who are considering applying to be a part of the social media subcommittee, I highly recommend doing so as it can provide professional opportunities to expand one's network and to learn from others in the field."
- James Coda
"I have benefited a lot from serving in the GSC Social Media Sub-Committee in 2018 and in the GSC Event Planning Sub-Committee in 2017. Through these experiences, I got the opportunity to talk with many talented and well-known scholars in the field, as well as junior scholars (like our graduate fellows!) who could be long-term collaborators and friends. Such experience broadened my view towards the field and opened a conversation that was just not limited to the sub-field that I am interested in researching. More importantly, I feel really proud to have the autonomy and voice to be heard as a graduate student."
- Yi Wang
2022-2023 Social Media Sub-Committee
Eva Jin, Arizona State University
Juyeon Yoo, Ohio State University
Wei Xu, Arizona State University
2021-2022 Social Media Sub-Committee
Yunjung (Eunice) Nam, Georgia State University
Tetiana Tytko, University of Maryland, College Park
Gordon West, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Sophia Minnillo, University of California, Davis
2020-2021 Social Media Sub-Committee
Yunjung (Eunice) Nam, Georgia State University
Larissa Goulart, Northern Arizona University
Tetiana Tytko, University of Maryland, College Park
2019-2020 Social Media Sub-Committee
Josiah Murphy, Kent State University
Yunjung (Eunice) Nam, Georgia State University
Yi Wang, University of Arizona
Larissa Goulart, Northern Arizona University
Svetlana Koltovskaia, Oklahama State University
2018-2019 Social Media Sub-Committee
Nicole Deschene, New York University
Andrea Lypka, University of South Florida
Maria Ruiz-Martinez, University of Colorado
2017-2018 Social Media Sub-Committee
James Coda, University of Georgia
Shyam Pandey, Purdue University
Jui-Hsin (Renee) Hung, Indiana University-Bloomington
2016-2017 Social Media Sub-Committee
Jessica Lian, Georgia State University