Dr. J's Blog of ELT Praxis

This Friday, April 6, 2018, I presented at the Conference on Language, Learning & Culture at Virginia International University in Fairfax on my study on the beliefs and practices of an online community of English language teachers. For the full schedule of the conference, click here . I was one of the first presentations of the day, and I was happy to present to an engaged audience that morning. They asked me many questions and provided comments that inspired me to continue with this line of research. In fact, from this dataset I have a second paper I have yet to write. Both papers describe my professional learning network through the Communities of Practice framework. This presentation reports on my first paper that describes the domain and practices of that community, whereas the second paper describes the community itself. You can access a PDF version of my presentation slides here . You can access my handout for my presentation here . The handout will be useful beca...

 The New Year marks our (my wife and me) 10th anniversary of leaving South Korea, where we both taught English at Sookmyung Women's University.  I taught in the TESOL certification program for in-service and pre-service English language teachers and she taught in the General English Program for undergraduate students.  Except for my summer job in 2011, we haven't been taught English in East Asia since December 2005. What has changed in the last 10 years? Although I haven't taught English in Japan and South Korea for 10 years, which is double the amount of years I taught in those countries, I have been keeping up to date through research and social media.  The research has helped me better understand the English language policies of both countries, but social media has been more informative regarding the cultural and professional experiences of English language teachers. Social Media By the start of 2006, most social media platforms did not exist or were in...

One reason that I am not posting so often on this blog is that I am busy with my PhD dissertation.  At this stage, I have written the first draft of my data analysis (Chapter 4) and I am in the process of revising my introduction and purpose for the study (Chapter 1).  I'm at a crossroads in terms of the latter.  I have made the smaller revisions as suggested by my dissertation committee.  However, there were some suggestions, not shared by everyone in the committee, about reframing the purpose.   So the purpose of this posting is to share my brainstorm for this possible reframing. This research project has been guided by my experiences as a sojourning English language teacher (ELT) in Japan, South Korea, and Russia.  At the turn of the millennium, when I was new to the field, there were not many ways to learn about the experiences of sojourning ELTs as compared to now.  I first prepared by reading travel and history books and watching videos about t...

I am in the data analysis phase of my dissertation, and one of the best benefits of doing this research is learning about the impact of social media on English language teachers abroad.  To clarify, my research is about the adjustment process of sojourning English language teachers, and I intend to complete my research and to publish my findings in peer-reviewed journals.  However, I wanted to share my enthusiasm of the learning process through social media.  This is part of my attempt to bridge the gap between researchers and practitioners. Through my research and my job as instructional designer at Kirkwood Community College, I have discovered many practitioners learning more about teaching and learning through social media than through peer-reviewed research journals.  This is completely anecdotal evidence as I am witnessing teachers sharing what they learn through their practice more than teachers sharing what they learn through reading research articles. ...