2023-2024 Social Media Sub-Committee

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 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 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 is currently a PhD. student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She has over ten years of experience teaching English as a second language 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 part 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.

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