1,720,964 research outputs found
Reading Graphic Novels in English as a Foreign Language for Social-Emotional Learning: A Case Study with Japanese EFL Learners
Get PDFRecently, the area of social-emotional learning (SEL) has started to receive attention from researchers and educators in mainstream education. However, there is a noticeable absence of research done in the area of additional language instruction. This report explores the possibility of the integration of SEL into language lessons through a small-scale case study of reading in English as a foreign language (EFL) using graphic novels. Two Japanese EFL learners took a series of lessons in dialogic reading of graphic novels in English over four weeks. Data was collected relating to developments in the learners’ vocabulary and SEL, specifically self-awareness. Simple assessments were made of vocabulary before and after the treatment. The comparison of pre- and post- assessments showed that there was a notable gain in command of emotional lexical items in English. In addition, a qualitative analysis of the discourse between the instructor and participants, as well as teachers’ notes, revealed that dialogic reading of graphic novels allowed learners to deepen their understanding of emotions through their use of English
A Korean EFL Teacher's Agency and Identity Construction Process: A Discourse Analysis Approach
Get PDFThis paper explores the discursive practices of a South Korean middle school English teacher in light of the growing gap between South Korean education’s social and cultural ideologies and the teacher’s sense-making process under contradicting circumstances. In contrast with the image of South Korea portrayed by foreign media and Western scholarship as one of the leading countries for education in general and English education in particular (Jenks, 2017; Park, 2009; Seth, 2002; Shim & Park, 2008), workers in the field of education in this country appear to be in agony (Kim, 2017; Namgung et al., 2020). To examine such a contradiction, a semi-structured interview with one South Korean English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher was conducted to investigate her work discourses in relation to concepts of teacher agency (Bourdieu, 1977; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Wertsch, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978) and teacher identity (Sachs, 2005). Analysis utilized the discourse analytic tools of positioning (Bamberg, 2004) and footing (Goffman, 1981) to better understand the deontic discursive practices that comprise the social practice of claiming the authority to dictate how education should be done in South Korea. The findings show that although there seems to be strong resistance to the impositions and demands by the hostile parties at the workplace, evidence indicates some instances of coping strategies in the same discourses
Making Waves: Anarcha-Feminist Encounters with Multilingualism in Hawaiʻi
No full textThe Hawaiian Islands bestow on us fresh conversations about multilingualism, shaped by Indigenous pursuits of sovereignty amidst a multiethnic settler society. Galvanized by encounters with multilingual abundance and Indigenous future-making, this dissertation recenters applied linguistics along dialogic lines to advance the case for a Public Applied Linguistics (PAL). How to connect with public audiences should be of vital interest to applied linguists. The discipline’s commitment to offer solutions for real-world problems flows alongside growing concerns about its track record for tangible societal change that enables multilingual lives to flourish. Reckoning with these paralytics, this dissertation coalesces with anarcha-feminism’s radical relationality and autoethnography’s unearthing power of storytelling to analyze, reflect on, and foment grassroots action, grounded in the author’s five-year involvement with language advocacy and activism in Hawaiʻi. Three sites of public engagement are analyzed that generated transformative action in support of multilingualism: 1) mobilization for legislative testimony; 2) digital storytelling, an activist walking tour, and guerrilla signage in a language teacher preparation course; and 3) Indigenous language planning in 19th and early 20th century Hawaiʻi which balanced Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Hawaiian) rhetorical sovereignty with the needs of a nascent multilingual island society. The dissertation suggests a) for action to become transformative individually and collectively, it must be paired with memory work – here feminist, activist, and Indigenous; b) in order to theorize and ethicize language activism, applied linguists need to participate in direct action from contentious locations within a more-than-human world; and c) autoethnography’s capacity for decolonial border-thinking and reflexive action offers applied linguists a conduit for interrogating multilingualism’s own territorial agendas from where travel towards Indigenous multilingual futures becomes possible. By tracing the author’s gradual reorientation away from the state as epicenter of language policy action to grassroots organizing and Indigenous knowledge systems, this dissertation moves multilingual relationships beyond issues of representation and identity politics towards differential yet complementary accountabilities that Kānaka ʻŌiwi and settlers hold vis-à-vis the Islands, the Indigenous language ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, and each others’ genealogies. If enacted with a care-full eye towards the situated ethics of multilingual encounters, PAL may inspire hope and grassroots relational action in Indigenous-settler contexts.Ph.D
Straight Up Howzit? A Schema Analysis of the Role of Pidgin in Police Work in Hawai‘i
Get PDFWhile Hawai’i’s multilingual and multicultural diversity is celebrated, the nature of multilingual practices in daily life is not well researched. To address this problem, this study draws on interview data to understand the role of languages other than English in the workplace, with a focus on Pidgin (Hawaiʻi Creole). I analyze interviews with three local police officers to better understand how they make use of Pidgin in their interaction with the community, and I use the officers’ reports to construct a set of schemas that govern their language choices. The study demonstrates that Pidgin is a valued resource that is regularly used to empower Hawaiʻi police officers to connect to their constituents, create harmonious relationships, and resolve problems while on patrol
Becoming and being a critical English language teacher: A mixed-methods study of critical consciousness
Get PDFThis mixed methods study investigates the development of critical consciousness of in-service, critical language teachers, or language teachers who teach for social justice. Although the area of critical language pedagogy has certainly developed since Pennycook’s (1990, 2001) call for a critical applied linguistics, the associated area of language teacher education for critical pedagogy has not. In critical pedagogy, a key construct as conceptualized by Freire is that of critical consciousness, which is the ability to “perceive social, political, and economic contradictions” and take action “against the oppressive elements of reality” (Freire, 1970/2014, p. 35). For English language teachers to support their students in developing critical consciousness, they, too, must have developed it. However, little is known about how English language teachers develop critical consciousness and how it affects their personal and professional beliefs and classroom practices (Crookes, 2015). In addition, in the literature of critical consciousness, the majority of studies have focused on the development of critical consciousness of marginalized youth rather than adults. The present study addresses this gap in the literature. Using a mixed research design, this study used quantitative and qualitative methods of data generation and analysis to address the following research questions: (a)How do critical language teachers, or language teachers who teach for social justice, experience developing critical consciousness? (b) Under what circumstances and to what extent, and caused by what factors and experiences do critical English language teachers come to understand their potential to foster social justice (i.e., develop critical consciousness) in the classroom? (c) What principles and teaching strategies do they draw on consistent with fostering social justice in the classroom? Quantitative methods included the development of a new critical consciousness scale for use with the language teacher population (N = 76) and exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Qualitative methods included the use of active interviews with 29 in-service English language teachers and narrative analysis, namely Bamberg's (1997) positioning analysis. In the EFA, four factors were extracted: (a) teacher beliefs about schooling and emotions towards inequality, (b) teachers as activists, (c) awareness of local educational context, and (d) content and strategies in the classroom. Narrative data support the four-factor structure as they relate to topics that emerged in the interviews. In addition, narratives of experiences such as being aware of contradictions, conflicting emotions (e.g., discomfort), and the effects thereof (e.g., reflection) were found to be consistent across narratives of becoming a critical English language teacher. Narratives of being a critical English language teacher were characterized by narratives of success and narratives of dissonance. The former related to the possibility of integrating the teacher’s personal values (principles) and teaching strategies (practices), whereas the latter were characterized by the impossibility of integrating the two. Lastly, the teachers in this study expressed the need for appropriate training and support in teaching for social justice. These findings have implications for critical language pedagogy and language teacher education with a critical pedagogy perspective. They suggest teaching strategies that can be transmitted in teacher development programs, courses that can engage pre-service teachers in identifying their personal values, and services that can support them in their development of critical consciousness.Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018
Towards Critical Literacy In Korean High School EFL Classrooms: Narrative Inquiry Into Teacher Emotions And The Use Of Critical Materials
Get PDFThis dissertation explores the emotional landscapes of two Korean high school English as a foreign language (EFL) as they begin to incorporate critical literacy practices into their regular high school EFL instruction. Critical literacy focuses on the connection between literacy and power by giving literacy a socio-political dimension (Janks, 2010, 2013). Language teachers are encouraged to help their students achieve a deeper understanding of texts by discussing how power dynamics influence everyday life, engaging in active analysis of the text, and offering strategies for uncovering the underlying messages within texts (Luke, 2012). In the critical classroom, language teachers are no longer the sole source of authority or knowledge, and students take on the role of active agents who co-construct knowledge with their peers and teachers to transform their reality in a way that allows them to read both the ‘word’ and the ‘world’ (Freire & Macedo, 1987). This learning process is indispensable for cultivating mature democratic citizens who have creative and critical minds endowed with the profound empathy to change both their own lives and the world around them. Attempting to use critical literacy materials, however, can pose a number of challenges for teachers in Korean high school EFL classrooms given the country’s test-oriented and top-down educational system. For successful implementation of critical literacy in this context, it is important to develop an understanding of teacher emotions because knowing how teachers feel is essential to understanding their teacher identities and instructional practices (Benesch, 2012; Zembylas, 2013). To investigate teacher emotions, I draw on narrative inquiry framework and triangulate data from longitudinal teacher narratives (collected before, during, and after the implementation of critical materials), audio-recorded classroom interactions (collected over the course of a semester), student surveys, and official school documents. The findings show that the teachers experienced a range of emotions, both positive and negative. While they initially reported having negative emotions such as resistance, uncertainty, lack of confidence, and even bodily discomfort (e.g., ‘sweat on the back’), these negative emotions were changed into positive ones through emotional engagement with critical literacy practices as the teachers co-constructed knowledge with their students. The teachers used critical literacy as a mediation tool to overcome the dissonance between their beliefs and actual teaching practices, which in turn led to the formation of renewed, empowered, and legitimate teacher identities. This study provides teacher narratives and descriptions of classroom-based interactions for use in critical language teacher education, a discussion of pedagogical implications for critical materials development, and recommendations for a paradigm shift towards critical literacy in test-oriented Korean high school EFL classrooms and similar contexts.Ph.D
INVESTIGATING THE EFFECT OF MOTIVATIONAL DESIGN ON SAUDI UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION AND L2 WRITING PERFORMANCE: AN EXPERIMENTAL MIXED METHODS DESIGN USING KELLER’S ARCS MODEL
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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