Panel 3: Breaking the Mark

Dr. Sykes is the Director of the Center for Applied Second Language Studies and Co-Director of the Chinese Flagship Program at the University of Oregon. She holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Romance Languages. Dr. Sykes is a national leader in the use of digital technologies for language acquisition. Her research focuses on the use of digital technologies for language acquisition with a specific focus on interlanguage pragmatic development and intercultural competence. Dr. Sykes’ experience includes the design, implementation, and evaluation of online immersive spaces and the creation of place-based, augmented reality mobile games to engage language learners in a variety of non-institutional contexts. She has published various articles on CALL-related topics, including computer-mediated communication and gaming.

Bob Hemmer has dedicated his career to learners and to learning. He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University, where he taught all levels of language classes. Prior to beginning his publishing career and association with Pearson’s World Languages group, he taught at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota and at Marquette University in Wisconsin, where he also served as the Spanish coordinator. Currently, as Editor in Chief for World Languages at Pearson, he leads all aspects of content creation and product development as the learning field accelerates its print-to-digital transformation.

Marta Gonzalez-Lloret is an associate professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Her main areas of research are the intersections of technology and Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT); technology and L2 pragmatics; Conversation Analysis for L2 interaction; teacher training; and assessment. She is currently one of the associate editors of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Carol Chapelle, general editor) and coeditor of the NFLRC’s Pragmatics & Language Learning book series. She is a board member of the CALICO organization and the International Consortium of TBLT. She is also a board member for the CALICO Journal, Language Learning & Technology, Journal of Multilingual Pragmatics, and GREAT Journal (Spain). She has been invited to present her research nationally and internationally to conferences and universities in Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, and Spain. Her most recent publications are a co-edited volume with Lourdes Ortega for John Benjamins (2014) Technology-mediated TBLT: Researching Technology and Tasks; a Georgetown University Press monograph A practical guide to integrating technology into task-based language teaching (In press, 2015); and an invited review article Conversation analysis in Computer-assisted Language Learning for CALICO’s latest issue (2015). She is a faculty advisor to the Center for Language and Technology and works closely with the center in the implementation of grants. Originally from Spain, she loves to travel and spend time in the ocean with her dogs.

Carsten Roever is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. He completed a teaching degree in English and Psychology at the University of Duisburg (Germany) in 1995, and earned a Ph.D in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 2001 with a dissertation on web-based testing of second language pragmatics, supervised by Prof. Gabriele Kasper. Carsten’s main research interests are development of second language pragmatic ability with an emphasis on interactional competence, and testing of second language pragmatics. He has also worked on methodological issues in interlanguage pragmatics and language testing research, as well as the use of technology for testing second language pragmatics. Carsten has published over 50 papers, including the co-authored volumes “Language Testing: The social dimension” with Tim McNamara (2006, Blackwell) and “Testing ESL sociopragmatics” with Catriona Fraser and Cathie Elder (2014, Peter Lang), as well as the edited collection “Pragmatics of Vietnamese as a native and target language” with Hanh thi Nguyen (2013, National Foreign Language Resource Center). He is currently completing “Quantitative Methods in second language research” with Aek Phakiti (scheduled for 2016, Routledge). Carsten is the outgoing editor of the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics.