Leah Shepard-Carey, a Ph.D. candidate in Second Language Education, recently received the Graduate Student Award from the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL). The award is granted based on the academic merit of the student’s proposal in applied linguistics or a related field. Shepard-Carey was nominated by her advisor, Professor Martha Bigelow.

Shepard-Carey’s proposal explores the inference-making processes of second-grade English learners in her English-as-an-additional language classroom. Her results highlight the interactions between peers and teachers and the context of their inferences in the literacy  classroom. Her research has implications for culturally-sustaining approaches to teaching and assessing reading comprehension.

Previous University of Minnesota winners include Karin Goettsch (1999), Noriko Ishihara (2004) and Beth Dillard Paltrineri (2016).

Learn more about second language education degrees and programs in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and graduate second language education research.