The 22nd Annual Graduate Student Conference of the College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature (LLL) at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa was held on Saturday, April 7th, 2018. As in past years, this conference offered the students in the six departments across the college, East Asian Languages and Literatures, English, Indo-Pacific Languages and Literatures, Languages and Literatures of Europe and the Americas, Linguistics, and Second Language Studies, the opportunity to come together and build a stronger community across the college by sharing their work with one another. This annual conference provides an opportunity for students to become socialized into academic practices, such as presenting at a conference and producing a paper for publication in these proceedings. It also allows students to take on various roles in the academic community, as all conference chairs, proceedings editors, coordinators, and volunteers for the conference are themselves graduate students. As the twenty-second iteration of this conference, it was the perfect opportunity to celebrate all the outstanding achievements of LLL graduate students. This year's conference theme, "L[superscript 4] : Languages, Linguistics & Literature for Life," well attests to the importance of all the creative and intellectual work done at the University of Hawai'i that contributes toward lifelong learning and enrichment. Following a preface (Mitsuko Suzuki) and plenary highlights (Gary Holton), papers in these proceedings include: (1) Taking a Knee: Colin Kaepernick's Pursuit of Stasis (Justin Clapp); (2) The Significance of Queer Specificity in Kim Sa-Ryang's "Into the Light" (1939) (Yijun Ding); (3) Learner Self-Evaluation for Developing English Communicative Competence: A Pilot Study (Hoa T. V. Le); (4) Yamben: A Previously Undocumented Language of Papua New Guinea (Andrew Pick); and (5) Examining the Validity of Conversation Tasks in the AP Japanese Exam: A Discourse Analytic Perspective (Nana Suzumura). [Cover title varies: "L[superscript 4]: Languages, Linguistics & Literature for Life. 22nd Annual Graduate Student Conference College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature. 2018 Proceedings."]