My name is Sarut Supasiraprapa, and I am a Ph.D. candidate in Second Language Studies.  I received a bachelor’s in economics from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, and a master’s in TESOL from Michigan State.  Before joining the SLS Ph.D. Program, I worked at Chulalongkorn University Language Institute, where I taught undergraduate academic English courses for economics and business students and helped develop test items for an English proficiency test used for the university’s academic admissions.   
My recent research has centered around two major areas.  One part of my work has been motivated by usage-based approaches to language acquisition, and this area of work has stemmed from my interest in linguistics theories.  I have conducted a project in which I used a semantic priming task to seek evidence for the psychological reality of the categorization process in the acquisition of first and second language verb argument construction semantics.  Also grounded in these approaches, my ongoing dissertation project investigates whether adult native English speakers and English learners exhibit sensitivity to corpus-derived frequency of compositional English multi-word sequences in both comprehension and production.  On a more applied side, the other part of my work focuses on advanced second language writing.  This research focus has developed from my own experience in learning English as a second language.  With Dr. Peter De Costa, I recently investigated how language teachers manipulate metadiscourse resources to construct their identity in a teaching philosophy statement, a key component in teaching job applications, and our article has been accepted for publication in TESOL Quarterly.

During my time in the SLS program, I have also had opportunities to do several types of graduate assistantship work.  For three academic semesters, I taught a course in pedagogical English grammar to undergraduate students.  Most of my students were education majors and planned to become elementary school teachers.  In addition, I took part in various projects as a research assistant for Dr. De Costa.  Most recently, I helped edit the 2017 special issue of The Modern Language Journal on transdisciplinarity and language teacher identity.  The training and work experience in the SLS program have helped me grow academically and professionally and will definitely be beneficial for my future career as an educator and a researcher.