Grant-in-Aid Application has been Approved!

I got word today that my Grant-in-Aid application to the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) has been approved. The title of my project is "Hesitation Phenomena in Second Language Development" (in Japanese, 「第二言語習得における躊躇現象」). It's a three-year project in which I aim to look closely at the production of hesitation phenomena in second language compared to first language speech. This will be done by organizing a corpus of first and second language speech, analyzing it to understand the developmental trajectory, and then evaluating whether development on this trajectory can be facilitated in second language learning activities.

I had made a similar application one year ago, but it was not accepted. As a consolation prize, the university gave me a small one-year grant-in-aid which I used to build a pilot corpus as a proof-of-concept. I believe the results of that work probably helped a lot to persuade the judges this time around. Anyway, I'm excited now to get started on the project. But first, there's a lot more paperwork to be done...

[Note: This post was actually written 10 August 2012, but has been back-dated to correspond to the actual events described herein.]