Bitcyhener
& Noch (2009), in their longitudinal research investigated the issue of
accuracy development as a result of the written corrective feedback. They
conducted the research investigating two research questions. One of them looks
for the ways to which extent accuracy can develop in 10 month period in providing
WCF and another looks for the difference in accuracy development in case of
providing several types of WCF(error correction; error correction +written
metalinguistic explanation; error correction+ oral and written
metalinguistic explanation).
The results
showed that all three groups that received feedback outperformed the group that
didn’t receive any feedback.
Based on
the above mentioned research results we can conclude that WCF can be effective
and useful I case of accuracy development but there are many other factors that
we need to take into consideration while using WCF and its effects on them.
I would
like to focus on the motivational factor. I think that providing no feedback is very
incorrect but the teacher should take into account the motivational factor of
her students because the main percentage of students’ success depends on
his/her motivation.
Sometimes
the teachers are concerned about which type of corrective feedback they need to
use to satisfy their student’s needs without making them demotivated. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60jeCvb6Eok)
I think
that direct WCF may affect negatively on students’ motivation and performance
so often times I try to avoid using this type of feedback in my classes. http://laslab.org/L2_2013/
Ethical
Issues: SLA
SLA researchers have always emphasized about
the importance of the method used in the study. But while conducting the
studies and eliciting the participants’ knowledge/answers about it, very often
there can be found a danger of violation of research ethics. The human participant
protection is very important in each research and each researcher should follow
them. When I was reading the modules for the online course of IRB (Institutional Review board) I have read about many traces of human rights violation happening many
years ago which was very impressive and negatively surprising to me.
There are two major issues that LOURDES ORTEGA is
concerned about research in SLA that can criticize its use.
1. Lack of relevance of SLA research for
teachers.
2. Crisis of the native speaker as a model and
norm for L2 learning.
Teachers initially are not researchers they are
practitioners and only a few of them are interested in doing researches. But I
think that doing a research is very essential and useful for the further
development of the teacher’s attitude towards her methodology, from which
depends the amount of completion of students’ needs. So the research first of
all needs to be socially valuable and serve to the completion of someone’s
needs. I suppose every teacher –researcher at least once needs to think how
valuable her research is for the society and to which it can be served to.
As talking about the Native speaker crisis as a
model of l2 learning, we can notice that day by day the amount of international
marriage is growing and the number of bilingual children is growing as well, so
very soon the phenomenon that Ortega calls
NS crisis will stop and the researchers of SLA can have participants (subjects)
to integrate in their research studies.
Paradigmatic
Controversies/
Contradictions/
and Emerging Confluences
About the complicated
research terminological issues are discussed in Guba and Lincoln’s (2005)
article. They define and discuss about such research paradigms as Positivism,
post positivism, critical theory, constructivism, and participatory paradigms) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xvpxBVCo0c
TABLE 6.1 Basic Belief (Metaphysics) of Alternative
Inquiry Paradigms
|
||||
Item
|
Positivism
|
Post-positivism
|
Critical
Theory et. al
|
Constructivism
|
Ontology
|
Native realism
-"real"
reality but
apprehend able
|
Critical
realism-"real" reality
but only imperfectly
and
probabilistically
apprehend able
|
Historical
real ism-virtual reality shaped by social, political, cultural, economic,
ethnic, and gender values crystallized over rime.
|
Relativism
–local and specific constructed realities
|
Epistemology
|
Dualist/
objectivism
findings true
|
Modified
dualist/objectivist;
critical
tradition/community;
findings
probably true
|
Transactional/subjectivist,
value mediated findings
|
Transactional/
subjectivist/
created
findings
|
Methodology
|
Experimental/
manipulative;
verification
of hypotheses;
chietly
quantitative
methods
|
Modified
experimental/
manipulative;
critical manipulative;
falsification
of hypothesis; may
include qualitative methods
|
Dialogic/dialectical
|
Hermeneutical/dialectical
|
Choosing between post-positivistic,
positivistic or realistic views depends on the researcher’s concerns and the
study itself.
Each
researcher is always concerned about the value of his/her research and findings
while conducting one. Value free research is impossible because every
researcher has his believes and preferences. The policy of each researcher is to
focus on personal values and hide the negative aspects of it.
It is
obvious that the researcher has the main control over the study. It may sometimes
cause the researcher’s’ control and power over the participants as well. It can
be noticed from the way of some researchers calling their participants subjects,
i.e. they are a step above their participants. I think that that if the
researcher is smart enough, he will be able to be more attentive and on equal
position (friendly) with the participants which will guarantee him to collect
more valuable data with frank answers. Otherwise, when the participants have no
trust and feel the authority, leadership over them some people may even refuse
to participate or give non- constructive answers.
The action research is considered to be the research
of the practitioners. There are opinions that action research may not be valid
because of some factors. One of them is the researcher being in a multiple
positions and losing the ability to focus in on thing. I suppose if the action
research is done by more than one researcher it can somehow benefit the quality
of findings.
Translanguaging
in the Bilingual Classroom
The idea
of translanguaging carries the meaning of using multiple languages
simultaneously to communicate. It’s a form of flexible bilingualism. Although translanguaging
comes to help students communicate and understand each other well, it may also
cause some difficulties in the development of student’s language learning
process. I think that while using translanguaging system the students already
get used to using it and when the need comes to use the languages separately
they become unable to do that. I suppose it may cause not complete or lack of
development of each language used by the students. I have strong doubts that one can reach
advanced level proficiency in each of the languages used by the student using
translanguaging or code switching. Translanguaging is mainly used in the formal classroom
environment, whereas code switching in an informal conversation.
The same
refers to code switching during which the person changes multiple languages in
the single context.
I have
the same opinion and concerns about the teachers using translanguaging in their
language classrooms. For Example if the
teacher uses Armenian then switches to the English Language or vice-versa in
order for her students to understand the message well, the students will always
wait for that and it will disturb the language acquisition process of both
languages. The same process will happen
for code-switching. I think and hope that I will never need to use those types
of bilingualism in my classes.
English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) concepts, use and
implications
Both Emglish
as a Lingua Franka (ELF) and World Englishes (WE) represent English spoken in
the differen environments but ELF means something more than English spoken from
the different angles of the world, it is the style of English speech
represented from each nation and country. Indians, Koreans, Australians etc.
have changed and adapted English language to their needs and understanding in
order to make it easy to communicate. Accordingly, there has become a danger of
losing the nativeness of English language and now no one really knows which the
pure English language is.
How about
teaching ELF in an EFL classroom?
I think that the students need to at least
listen, become familiarized and discuss some accents and types of English during their English
language classes because they will face that in their real life
situation and be ready for that. Otherwise at some point they may
consider the process of their learning
English useless because they cannot communicate with the representatives of
other countries/nations. For example, when the student, that has never heard an
Indian English speech, meets an Indian and wants to communicate but understands
the no single word, and become unable to
communicate, s/he becomes disappointed considers
his English classes somehow useless. Taking that fact into account I strongly
agree integrating ELF in my GE classes. But the EFL/ESL teachers need to be
careful about the time (proficiency level and age) and amount of ELF integration
in their classrooms. I think that it would be ineffective to use it with the
lower proficiency level and age and it’d be meaningful to use starting from
intermediate level of 15 and above age students.
The Impact of
Physical Environment on Learning
Physical
environment plays a great role on the student’s learning progress and health.
There are
some important factors mentioned by Woolner et al. (2007), that are needed to
be taken into account during making a physical environment for both the teachers and students, especially when the
students are little kids, because they are standing on their way of development
both physically and mentally.
They are
the following:
Temperature,
ventilation and air quality:
Having ''
clean air quality'' may lead to the teacher's desire of having ''active''
learning environment and of course, it is beneficial for both teacher and
students’ health . Besides it is always pleasurable to breathe fresh and clean
air.
Lighting
Lighting
is one of the primary factors in the classroom. The daylight is always healthy
and beneficial for the student’s achievement but as it is impossible to be
served with the daylight, some researchers suggest having automatically
controlled electric lighting. They say it can positively affect mood, attitude
and performance.
Colour
Color is
also very important factor for the learning environment. It can affect mood,
some wall colors can make students sleepy or on the contrary- aggressive.
According
to Hamid and Newport (cited in Woolner et al., 2007), preschool kids are more
active and more motivated in pink colored room. Some researchers suggest that
female students are more sensitive to colors and perform better in their favorite
color environment.
Noise
According
to my observations there are two types of students: The first type can be
concentrated in case of noise presence and another type can never do that because some people are highly sensitive to
noise and some are not.
According
to Cohen et al. (cited in Woolner et al., 2007) noise may raise blood pressure
or result in annoyance and affect mood.
Build
Quality
The
appearance of building can also impact on students’ learning, mood and
motivation. Ahrentzen and Evans (cited in Woolner et al., 2007), mention that high
ceilings prevent the feelings of being crowded in the classroom whereas low
ceilings lead to cooperative behavior among preschool children.
The above
mentioned factors are very important for the future of the children learning at
schools. So I think at least half of them need to be considered in our Armenian
school to make the students learning environment comfortable and healthy
causing them to come to school with pleasure because they need to spend their
half of the day in a pleasurable and bright environment.
ON THE RELATION BETWEEN AUTOMATED ESSAY SCORING AND
MODERN VIEWS OF THE WRITING CONSTRUCT
Based on
what I have read and what have been discussed in the classroom on this topic I
can say that automated rating has its positive and negative sights in essay
rating system.
All the language
teachers always have tones of essays to check and instead of checking them by
hand they would prefer an automatic helping hand for them to finish the job on
time. This is a great help for busy teachers who can rely on the machine to do
the half of their job.
On the
other hand, we all are familiar with the technological problems that can arise
during the scoring procedure.
Besides
there's a need to refer to the psychological feelings of the students being
rated by the machine. For example, frankly speaking I became very upset and disappointed
when I was informed that my TOEFL essay was rated by the machine (I hoped at
least that it would be rated by the person)
As a
solution it is suggested to have two stages of essay scoring first the machine
is checking like a draft, and then the human looks through the errors and
mistakes and finalizes the mistakes and
errors that are needed to be taken into account.
Immersion Teachers
Immersion is a form of bilingual education that aims
for additive bilingualism by providing students with a sheltered classroom
environment in which they receive at least half of their subject-matter
instruction through the medium of a language that they are learning as a
second, foreign, heritage, or indigenous language. In addition, they receive
some instruction through the medium of [the majority language] in the
community. (p. 8) (as cited in Cammarata & Tedick2012, pp.252)
Immersion
programs can be beneficial for the development of students’ knowledge and
thinking skills.
Immersion
students can gain privilege towards the students learning in the general
classrooms. According to many scholars the immersion students outperform their
peers learning in the general classrooms and can achieve higher level of functional
proficiency in the immersion language.
How can
immersion teachers balance the language and content together so as bilingual students
benefit from both of them?
This is a
very hard question that we also discussed in the classroom. This is also considered to be one of the
challenges that the immersion teachers face during teaching immersion programs.
Besides that teachers have another great challenge- lack of pedagogical content
knowledge in language teaching which itself leads to the disturbance of the
language and content balance in teaching the program.
In order
to keep the language and content immersion more or less
balanced the teachers should pass training courses as well as complete their knowledge in
either content or language or both in order to be able to manage their classes
effectively.
Repetition
Vocabulary
Webb (2007) suggested the
study done about the impact of the vocabulary repetition on the vocabulary and
syntax acquisition process.
The results showed that the student’s acquisition of the vocabulary, knowledge of
orthography, syntax and
grammatical functions could be acquired from the reading. They could acquire
the vocabulary after 10th repetition of the unfamiliar words.
It is very
hard for the researchers to count separately and decide the amount of the words
and syntactic structures in the texts. Here some technological tools counting
the number of words and items repeated in the context come to help the
researchers. During our class discussion our group tried out the two of such
technology tools. You can find them following the links http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/
They can be
very useful technology tools for EFL teachers to decide the number of unknown
words and target grammar structure in the text and if there is a need the
teacher can adapt the text according to the students needs.
Capturing L2 Accuracy Developmental Patterns;Insights From an Error-Tagged Learner EFL Corpus
The study conducted by Thewissen (2013) represents the learners’
different error patterns detected by corpora. Three
methodological steps used to capture learners’ errors are 1) the rating
procedure, 2) the error tagging phase and 3) error counting phase. CEA
(computer-aided error analysis) was used to detect the errors.
The
results of the study showed that along with proficiency level of learners becoming higher, the number of
errors is decreasing significantly. When the proficiency level increases, it
happens to learners’ overall level of accuracy. This improvement becomes
obvious mostly between adjacent B1 and B2 proficiency levels that are the
numbers of certain types of errors is decreasing by the time learners approach
B2 level. The same progress between B1 and B2 cannot be seen for lexical
features, as the progression of lexis lasts longer and happen in all levels,
from intermediate to advance.
When it comes to discuss the
study and analyze the methods used in this study there immediately comes the
technology use issue and as we all are already familiar with the technological
errors at least once in our lives, it is very hard to trust technology again. I
think that the researchers have thought about that as well and after the
computer error detection assigned the human rater to do that. I suppose the CEA
can be very handy tool for teachers to use because the teachers are always
having time constrains in their curriculum.
But I also consider that error analysis
and grading by the machine can be frustrating and discouraging for students as
happened to me during my TOEFL exam.
Investigating the viability of a collocation
list for students of English for academic purposes
The paper by Philip Durrant (2009) aims to evaluate whether the Cross
disciplinary collocations differ in type from the collocations on which most
researchers have traditionally focused. He investigated whether these
collocations are worth learning in general, and whether they are of equal value
to students from all disciplines.
As to take an example, the key
collocations list includes 36 pairs instantiating the often-taught ‘reporting’
pattern ‘verb + that’. Of these 36, many contain alternate forms of the same
verb (e.g. assume, assumed, assumes, and assuming all get separate entries).
According to the author the benefit of listing grammatical
collocations is that they may draw attention to productive patterns which are
tied to specific lexis in a way that can lead them to be overlooked by
traditional grammars.
Frankly speaking I do not understand the meaning
of focusing on collocations separately and I would confess that I hardly got any valuable and memorable
information from our class discussion based on this topic.
Medical ESP
Li et.al (2009) in his paper reports about the analysis of structural and linguistic evolution of medical research
articles (RAs) written in English.
Researchers of
the study analyzed the frequency of occurrence of 11 moves identified by Nwogu (1997), of the three most
frequently used verb tenses (simple past, simple present and present perfect).
The results showed that medical RAs have undergone some linguistic and
structural changes. The change of the frequency of occurrence of some verb
tenses and personal pronouns have presented some tangible evidence for this
genre evolution. The findings of this study may help medical RA writers better
understand the changes or development of medical RAs, both structurally and
linguistically.
From the analysis of
this article it becomes obvious for me that the structure of all RAs are more
or less same, independent of the sphere. While reading this article unfortunately
I could not find any connection with Teaching English and I am still concerned
about it how the results of this study can contribute to teaching.
Challenging stereotypes about academic writing: Complexity,
elaboration, explicitness
Academic writing is considered to be one
of the most challenging types of language that includes complex grammar
structures and styles of writing.
Being a primary source-student who
experienced passing the Academic Writing course at the university I would like
to share the level of challenge that I experienced during the course.
I
think that AW is very important to know for every MA student because it is the
basement of every academic project that is to be written (e.g. paper, capstone
etc.) but I think that the teachers teaching this course should maximally ease
the process of students’ understanding and lighten their job.
For example I have learnt to write the
citations by hand, which I had no way to remember, whereas later I found out
that there are many technological tools that allows you to insert the
information and receive the ready APA style citation.
Another challenge for me was to
synthesize the ideas and make the product meaningful for the reader.
I suppose as a an AW teacher one needs
to provide many samples, models and tutorials in order for students to digest
and practice this complex language more easily and effectively.
To sum I can say that AW course is very
important and I strongly disagree that some universities cannot provide or
cancel from the course curriculum because as I mentioned above it is considered to be the basis of the basis of the academic/professional
language development.
