Teaching Reading and Writing Week 4

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This week I look briefly at Rinnert and Kobayashi's (R and K) article: “Situated Writing Practices in Foreign Language Settings” from the beloved New Directions in Writing Research book. I've thoroughly enjoyed everything found within its covers.

R and K ask: What is the situated nature of writing? Unfortunately, before I can engage with their answer I must overcome a bit of disorientation and suspicion about the phrase “situated nature.” There seems to be a suggestion here, against what I understood Sasaki to have argued, that teaching meta knowledge improves writing ability. Hmm. More on this later. No surprise, R and K are aware of and influenced by Sasaki, so it's likely that I am simply misunderstanding something early on here.

As R and K present a study of studies, I am reminded of a recent editorial about medical journals http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre .While it's easier to worry less about such things in TESOL, I wonder if the R and K had serious criticism about the methodology employed in each of the 12 studies they generalize from today. It takes a fair bit of imagination to dream up some TESOL conflicts of interest, but who knows? I wish I knew more about the process that legitimized and published the preceding findings.

As for our findings today, I learn here that preferences for style are dynamic. There is good reason to believe that when you write more in L2, the features of L2 composition will likely be reflected in L1. Is this claim overstated? I think a much larger study, contrasting writers with various L1s writing in various L2s would be needed to establish it. Perhaps it applies only to Japanese learners of English.

Next topic: we've heard in class that Korean's typically don't write much in school. How do Japanese students fair? R and K again seem to mischaracterize their findings. They begin by noting a big emphasis on reading, and conclude, somehow, that Japanese students do study writing to a high degree. The progression seems a bit tenuous, and the middle bit doesn't improve matters: the authors suggest that a 1-4 month period of intensive study for a single specific college entrance essay is all you need to close the gap. Really? Who else places actual emphasis on composition besides American educators?

I next read about R and K's qualitative ground game. It's nice to see, and in line with Sasaki. Write and then review the video of the session. They have no problem establishing that instruction benefited the students. As a teacher, that's always nice to read. Specifically, it looks like specialized training in L1 really pays off in L2: students generate better structures and better examples. R and K can't quantify this, but that's no problem. Is this what they meant at the onset by meta cognitive skills? Advanced students with training overseas are more likely to have definitions and counter claims. This jives with findings by Sasaki that “overseas experience can lead students to re conceptualize the task of writing through imagination of a possible audience that motivates them to refine their writing.”

Fun read.

Qualitative Analysis Week Two

Today I'll look at Creswell's chapter on five different approaches to qualitative research.

His description of the narrative approach starts off unsurprisingly: the researcher tells a story. No kidding. After skipping over a few paragraphs near “postmodern,” I have a few questions. Does it make sense to call biographies and autobiographies research? While I'm happy to question assumptions underpinning quantitative research in line with what Professor Reynolds mentioned last week, this seems extreme. Stories play a large roll in our lives, and have great value. But how can telling them be research?

I encourage anyone interested in Phenomenology to read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology . Can you even study the structure of consciousness as experienced from a first person point of view? It's a question for experts, philosophers, and while not an expert myself, I am knowledgeable enough to have strong opinions. I am also knowledgeable enough to know that Creswell is no expert, and will not address my concerns. I'm skipping this section as too dubious to bother with. I'm not on board with his premises, and he has no interest in arguing with me. Apparently, “Phenomenology can feature a streamlined form of data collection.” What exactly is the data? What is “epoche” or “bracketing”? ...Cui bono?

Next: Grounded Theory Research. I'm hopeful here. The title includes several words I like. However, I read that theory is “an abstract analytical schema of a process...”. Why does Creswell use “schema” and not “scheme” or "construct" or "system" ? If he's going to use technical terms, he needs, at some point, to tell me what he means by them. How can I understand the overview without them? Anyway, since I'm supposed to generate a theory of a process or action or interaction, I would like to have had some examples of each. Better still, to see some results. Kids in middle school biology offer results for different research methods. Graduate level educational theory? Sorry, no luck. Again, I skip any page with “constructivist.” “Positivist” is good, though. “Foucault” Next.

The methodology section for Grounded Theory Research is the highlight of Creswell's article. I typically think of knowledge as legitimized by the process which generates it, and I want to know more about what justifies a researcher's use of a particular method. Creswell lists a series of terms which if explained would likely go a long way to doing that: categories, theoretical sampling, constant comparative, causal conditions, strategies, intervening conditions, axial coding, and conditional matrix. These all sound good. Do these terms allow practitioners of Grounded Theory Research to falsify and eliminate competing hypotheses? Can you use Grounded Theory Research, and other qualitative good bits (questioning the clarity of data) to evaluate existing theories? Perhaps I should evaluate existing studies of writing.

How does Ethnography differ from narrative? I again wonder about the kind of value this research generates. Are these people really OK with simply telling stories which differ in no important way from a podcast? I would loathe to pay twenty thousand dollars to learn how to blog.

That's all I have for now. Creswell mentions in his conclusion that interviews take precedence in Grounded Theory Research, as opposed to other methods. I don't understand why that is so, and would like to learn more. Aside from such questions, I take very little away from Creswell's overview.

Teaching Reading and Writing Week One

In this post, we briefly set out the main points from, and respond to two articles: How to Research Second Language Writing, by Charlene Polio, and chapter six from The Globalization of Scholarship, by John Flowerdew and Yongyang Li. Polio's article is practical. Flowerdew and Li's is almost pointless.

Polio's paper is her attempt to classify the world of second language writing instruction. She divides up research performed in the field into several categories. She analyzes concepts connected to these methods, and finally provides a general template for how to conduct research, with (her running commentary also contributing to this end.

We learn at the paper's onset that there are eight ways to research: surveys, interviews, meta-analysis, classroom observation, ethnography, content analysis, text analysis, and process search. A couple highlights: content analysis hopes to describe the texts L2 writers will have to produce. People rarely employ meta-analysis due to the sheer volume of material required. Research issues include the reactivity problem, and the veridicality problem. Basically, how students react to their own think aloud processes, and how accurately they can portray these processes are problems for several research methods.

Reading research on research has nice benefits. Novices gain a bird's eye view of the design space they hope to master by one who is well traveled. Green experimenters might not realize all the different ways to conduct research, or the problems they will encounter. It would be devastating to lose a month of data and effort due to some subtle structural hiccup. More over, the particular case studies she has highlighted and set aside contain exemplary research questions.

What changes could be identified in the students’ general L2 proficiency?

What changes could be identified in their L2 composition quality?

What changes could be identified in their L2 writing fluency?

What changes could be identified in their L2 writing strategy use?

What changes could be identified in their L2 writing style?
What characteristics of L2 writing experts did they acquire?

These are focused and definite, and we fully expect to ask them in the future. Yet we have learned that even in strongly formulated questions, key terms and metrics in writing analysis are devious to pin down. How devious are they? Are we just not clever enough? Or can we pin them to a range of acceptable values? How important is it that we clearly define the data? How does this affect the legitimacy of teaching English writing? What exactly are you teaching? While beyond the scope of Polio's paper, these questions are a nice product of our engagement with it.
(Flowerdew and Li will have to wait until class. Whoops.)