Postdoctoral Scholar Sonca Vo Receives Research Funding From IELTS and Presents With Dr. MaryAnn Christison at AAAL

Sonca Vo and her colleague Yen Vo at University of Iowa received a research funding from IELTS for their research project "The Relationship between IELTS Writing Test Scores and Academic Writing." Their research looks at how IELTS writing test scores contribute to students' academic writing and if these scores can be used to exempt students from academic writing courses.

At AAAL held in Denver in 2025, Dr. MaryAnn Christison and Dr. Sonca Vo presented their paper on 'Evaluating Meta-linguistic Awareness in Teachers of Multilingual Learners.' The abstract is as follows:

Metalinguistic awareness is defined as knowledge of linguistic features and the ability to verbalize this knowledge using metalinguistic terms (Krulatz & Christison, 2023). The ability to promote metalinguistic awareness in learners requires teachers to have explicit knowledge about language structures (Andrews, 1999; Cenoz et al., 2001; Jessner, 2008). However, research on how teachers develop metalinguistic awareness and how it can be evaluated is scarce. This study sought to answer three research questions: (1) What are the relationships among teachers’ perceptions, self-assessments, and their actual performance on tasks measuring meta-linguistic abilities (production)? (2) To what extent do teachers’ perceptions and self-assessments predict their production? and (3) To what extent do specific teachers characteristics predict their perceptions, self-assessments, and production? The participants in the study were 472 candidate teachers who were enrolled in an undergraduate program in teacher education at a large research university in the western United States. The teachers completed a survey with 14 items targeting their perceptions of their meta-linguistic awareness, 38 items self-assessing their abilities to teach language structures, and 26 items that measured their meta-linguistic awareness and knowledge of language structures. The results from structural equation modeling showed that (a) self-assessments were more likely to be higher if they performed better on measures of meta-linguistic awareness; (b) perceptions did not significantly predict test performance but self-assessments significantly predicted test scores; and (c) teachers’ education significantly predicted perceptions and test performance as well as whether they were pre-service or practicing teachers. This study suggests that teachers’ self-assessment could be used as a way to assess their knowledge about language. Moreover, the study suggests that education and experience in teaching play a role in helping teachers increase their metalinguistic awareness.