PhD Candidate Ana Ruiz Alonso Bartol presents at the AAAL conference in March 2026, Chicago

Ana says: "Attending the American Association of Applied Linguistics 2026 conference was really beneficial. I

presented two posters based on recent projects about teacher beliefs around writing assessment and artificial intelligence. Her co-presenter and I (who I met in person for the first time at the conference, since we had been working remotely on Zoom), got to talk to more than 20 people in each of the sessions, spreading the word about our upcoming article for one of the posters, exchanging information with researchers working on related fields for potential collaborations and learning about how other institutions are handling such pressing issues. I also attended around 12 talks and plenaries, for topics that impact my research and my teaching, such as critical examination of participation rubrics in language teaching, artificial intelligence tools to foster conversation fluency through role-play games, virtual reality tools to improve intercultural competence, culturally responsible writing assessment in the AI era, assessing multilingual learners, or open-access research, to name a few. I also learned about methodological tools and I'm planning to implement some of the strategies I learned into my research projects and my own teaching at UC Davis! Finally, I attended meetings of special interest groups that I am interested in learning more about, like the Study Abroad and the Vygotskian Sociocultural Linguistics, where I interacted with very established scholars. The Davis "delegation" got together with former alumni like Diego Alins and César Hoyos, with whom I am talking about potential future research collaborations. All in all, it was a very enriching experience and I am extremely thankful to the Department for the financial support that allowed me to attend this flagship conference for the first time.