Two ECU students, Anna Lawrence (undergraduate) and Ashley Meehan (graduate), won the “Best Paper Presentation Award” at the 13th Annual TESOL / Applied Linguistics Graduate Students Conference hosted at East Carolina University on February 13, 2016. Their paper, entitled Morphosyntactic Variation in an Emerging Dialect of Spanish in Eastern North Carolina, reports on findings from an ongoing study that investigates the formation of Spanish communities in the rural south. This research is being conducted under the mentorship of Dr. Stephen Fafulas, current Director of the SoCIOLing Lab.