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...

Last week at the 2017 INTESOL Conference , I gave a presentation with my colleague, Emi Zlatkovska from the University of Southern Indiana, on extensive reading at our respective IEPs. Below are excerpts from the slides from my half of the presentation. What is Extensive Reading? ER is a pedagogical approach in which teachers help and allow learners to choose what they want to read, and they act as a role model of a reader to enable learners to engage in the specific type of reading: ‘fluent, sustained, comprehension of text as meaning-focused input; large volume of material; reading over extended periods of time; and texts are longer, requiring comprehension at the discourse level’ (Waring & McLean, 2015, p 165). The Effect of ER Programs on Learners Overall reading proficiency – small to medium effect (Jeon & Day, 2015; Nakanishi 2014) Highest effect with adults One year of ER had a higher effect than one semester of ER  Easier materials are more beneficia...

My career has taken me to the uncomfortable and sometimes exciting spot in English language teaching or education in general: middle management, a term I dislike. As an advocate of teachers, I find my direction and passion by supporting teachers, helping them make their jobs more meaningful. Unfortunately, I have had to work with supervisors that didn't understand or share this vision. I'm not sure if they saw me as someone to "manage" teachers, but it often felt like it. If you don't know what middle management jobs are, and there are a lot of them, they go by many different names. Match any of the words in the left column with the words in the right column to create a job title that can describe the same job. It seems that most of these job descriptions do not include research, which I believe is essential in developing curriculum and professional learning. It also seems obvious to me that a background in pedagogical research (and for ELT, research in ap...

Last Thursday, I was reviewing literature for a research project that is just underway, and I came across a couple tables that resonated with me so much that I had to share it on Twitter. The tables come from Simon Borg's 2010 article "Language Teacher Research Engagement." These tables would have come in handy if I had found them prior to my research project with teachers at an intensive English program (IEP) in the United States. They would have supported my professional learning and curriculum development philosophies as an administrator because I believe these two areas, professional learning and curriculum development, should have strongly overlapping goals as an English language teacher. Furthermore, I believe that it is in the best interest of an institution to support this in order to improve the curriculum. This belief is based on the assumption that curriculum is not static because is based on the needs of the learners, which are dynamic, as well as the ...

I'm collaborating on a research and development project for integrating extensive reading into intensive English programs. After the initial review of the most recent literature, I was quite surprised at the overwhelming positive effects of extensive reading on reading proficiency, comprehension, and motivation. Although I'm still skeptical, I'd like to share the findings with you. I looked at 17 articles published since 2012. Although this may not seem like much, 3 of these articles were meta-analyses, which investigated a much larger quantity of studies on extensive reading. Only one was not relevant to intensive English programs, bringing it down to 16 articles. Many of these articles came from the 2015 discussion forums in Reading in a Foreign Language . The majority of those discussion forum articles were not empirical studies, but they went in depth answering "What constitutes extensive reading?" After summarizing these answers, this blog post covers the r...

One of the more influential TESOL Quarterly articles I have read over the past decade was Karen E. Johnson's "The Sociocultural Turn and Its Challenges for Second Language Teacher Education." It helped guide me during the early stages of my doctoral dissertation. I'm revisiting now because it relates to my current position, and I wanted to see if Dr. Johnson's concerns are still valid ten years later. Theory/Practice Versus Praxis From my perspective, the theory-practice dichotomy is still quite prevalent in teacher education. I have entered discussions with our faculty on what should stand at the core of our ESL curriculum, which I perceive as research in applied linguistics or informal research in teaching and learning. I see this more as a applied linguistics-education dichotomy as research is on both ends, but education is more steeped in practice. Johnson recommends praxis as a solution to this dichotomy because it "is more suitable for the prepara...

In my current job, I am helping our program design an academic bridge program for conditionally admitted undergraduates students to the university's mechanical and civil engineering programs. I am just in the early stages of designing, conducting a needs analysis with the department heads and reviewing literature on engineering English, which is a branch of English for Specific Purposes.  After conducting a brief literature review on articles published since 2012 on English language programs for engineers, a few major patterns arose. Image from http://deceptivelyeducational.blogspot.com/2012/05/engineering-bridge.html Needs Analysis Some papers (Kim, 2013; Mohamed, et al. 2014; Paci, 2013; Porcaro, 2013) recommended conducting a needs analysis before designing the curriculum. This is common sense for those like me coming from a background in instructional design.  Porcaro (2013) provided the most details regarding how to proceed with a needs analysis for this purpose,...

Dissertations & Theses Dissertations and theses are not always the best studies, but they provide more depth into an area of inquiry than most research articles mainly because there are fewer or no restrictions on the length of the writing.  If you're not familiar with PhD dissertations, many are over 100 pages long and it's not uncommon to find ones that are over 200 pages long.  Master's theses are typically shorter than dissertations, but the research methodology is usually not as rigorous. When I was searching for literature on intensive English programs, a good proportion of the studies were dissertations and theses.  Although they are more time-consuming to read, I find that literature review in dissertations are very helpful with learning more about the current research.  I'd like to briefly review the findings of these dissertations and theses regardless of the quality of their methodology (for MA theses) for the purpose of understanding trends. To...

From 2003 to 2007, TESOL Methodology was my thing.  I taught it as a teacher trainer at Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul, Korea and as a Senior English Language Fellow in Russia.  Before earning my PhD, those two jobs were the high points of my career.  Now I am in a position that combines those experiences with my newer (raw) skills as a researcher, coordinating curriculum for an intensive English program.  One thing I love about this job is that I get to revisit literature on TESOL methodology through the lens of a researcher. Shocked Not Shocked As I'm updating myself on the developments of content-based instruction (CBI), I was shocked how much of the literature is based more from the qualitative side of research than quantitative.  Then again, I had to remind myself about education research in general, that's it's quite difficult to conduct ethical and valid "experiments" in the classroom.  I remember that deflated feeling early in my course...

What does this figure mean? This is one way the work of English language teaching can be framed, according to Pennington & Hoekje (2014).  This appeals to me as both a practitioner and a researcher because attention to English language teaching is often simplified to only instruction.  The other parts of the frame sometimes influence learning and pedagogy more than direct instruction.  To learn how so, I will review the peripheral parts of the frame that support instruction. Disciplinary Field Pennington & Hoekje (2014) claim that the three disciplinary fields had the most affect on English language teaching curriculum:  linguistics, psychology, and education.  They also claim that the "home discipline of ELT" is applied linguistics, where studies on second language acquisition are in the heart of the profession.  Coming from two graduate programs in education, I am much aware of the differences linguists, applied linguists, and educators br...

Over the summer, one of my favorite reads was Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, published earlier this year by Belknap Press.  This book was very helpful in summarizing studies I have read and heard about as a graduate student and it also helped clarify the teaching techniques and learning strategies that have sufficient evidence in their efficacy.  I believe this book should be included in introductory courses in teacher education programs. For this posting, I'd like to go through the book's Tips for Teachers (pages 225-228) and apply them to English language teaching and second language acquisition. Tip #1 - Explain to Students How (English Language) Learning Works If students are finding that English language learning is difficult that may indicate that they're improving their learning.  The language will be easier to use and components of the language (grammar rules, vocabulary, ways to pronounce, etc.) should ...