Four Graduate Students Travel to TALGS

At the 24th annual TALGS (TESOL and Applied Linguistics Graduate Student) Conference,  former ECU ENGL professor Dr. Ekaterina Sudina (University of Maryland, College Park)was the keynote speaker. Sudina joined students and faculty from throughout the Southeast to exchange their research and teaching practices. This year marks the tenth year of collaboration between ECU’s Department of English and Greensboro College’s Department of English.

The conference was co-directed by ECU English’s Dr. Mark Johnson (English/linguistics) and others in the North Carolina linguistics community. Altogether, four ECU English graduate students (2 MAs and 2 PhDs) made the trip to Greensboro for this event, including one MA student, Shannon McGinnis (MA-English), who presented a very interesting paper, “K-Pop’s Foray into Language Education: Analyzing Learn! Korean With BTS.” (“BTS” is a popular K-Pop “boy band” that released a Korean language-learning app to help its global fans—the BTS Army—learn Korean language, idiom, and culture.)

The 25th annual TALGS conference will celebrate its big anniversary on ECU’s campus in February 2026.