21st Annual Graduate Student Symposium | From Classroom to Community: Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies for a Changing World

Thursday, April 2, 2026 from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm

• In-person event
• 2017, Dunton Tower, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

On Thursday, April 2, 2026, SALaDS will be hosting their annual graduate student symposium. This year the topic of the symposium is From Classroom to Community: Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies for a Changing World.

The symposium brings together and showcases graduate student and upper-year undergraduate student research from the School of Linguistics and Language Studies (SLaLS) and related disciplines in a supportive atmosphere to share ideas and discuss recent language-related projects.

Schedule

Keynote with Christopher Cox | Reflections on the ‘Peripheral’ in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies

Applied linguistics and discourse studies broadly define their theoretical and empirical purview to encompass a wide range of real-world issues in which language plays a central role (cf. Groom & Littlemore, 2011). Within the broad scope of this definition, scholarship in both fields shows notable patterns of recurrence among certain research sites, populations, and theoretical and methodological modes of investigation (e.g., formal second language education involving majority languages in applied linguistics, investigations of institutional or societal ideologies in discourse studies) that have, over time, shaped the character of applied linguistics and discourse studies as they are practiced today. The impact of such recurring research practices can be conceptualized in terms of categorization theory as establishing a prototype (in the sense of Rosch, 1973) for these fields: the frequency and perceived impact of work in these recurring research contexts serve to establish central members of each discipline, while still admitting studies that may differ from this emergent norm as valid members of a larger periphery.

In this talk, Chris will reflect on the value of attending to what might be considered ‘peripheral’ practices in applied linguistics and discourse studies and the role they play in informing current conceptions and future directions of these fields. Drawing on examples from recent collaborations in language education, documentation, and revitalization with Indigenous communities in western Canada, he will demonstrate how community-based praxis often diverges from the typical profile of applied linguistics and discourse studies. These differences illuminate both the distinctiveness of this language work (Leonard 2017) and the assumed, prototypical centers of these fields. Attention to experiences at the peripheries of current conceptions of applied linguistics and discourse studies can, he argues, do more than establish new outposts on the frontiers of these disciplines. Rather, careful consideration of the non-prototypical might serve as an important act of recentering, drawing applied linguistics and discourse studies into closer alignment with the needs and perspectives of a wider range of language users in a rapidly changing world.

Poster Session Titles

For more information about these presentations, please review the abstracts in the symposium program.

• Constructing Health Risk and Uncertainty in Canadian Health Policy: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis
• Two-Eyed Seeing in Practice: Pedagogical Pathways for Learning Polysynthetic Verb Morphology
• Bridging Practice and Theory: Exploring the Intersection of ePortfolios, Digital Storytelling, and Sociocultural Theory in Language Teaching and Learning
• “Distinctively Canadian”: The Discursive Construction of Canadian Linguistic Identity in CBC Podcasts
• From Fear to Fluency: A Critical Inquiry into Technology and Speaking Anxiety in ESL Contexts
• The Language Behind the War of the Mind
• The Use of Phrasal Verbs in Collocational Patterns: A Comparative Corpus-based Study of Chinese and Japanese L2 Learners
• What about Ontario? A Literature Review of Research on University Sexual Violence Policies and the Discourse Gap