Dear class,
Due to some technical problems, Hoa asked me to post her commentary for her!!
In the last three class sections, we had chances to present our projects, view other’s empirical studies and get or give comments to each other. Below is my short review of each presenter’s topics. I had only ten minutes to take notes from each presenter so there can be some misunderstandings or it could not express as much as the presenters did so please feel free to give comments or corrections.
1. Shu-Ling: Learning to Express Motion Events in L2 Chinese
Shu Ling designed her own items to investigate student’s expression of movement when learning Chinese. The items are very well-designed with pictures demonstrated for each question. She also made several insightful suggestions for teachers who teach Chinese. For example, teachers should direct students’ attention to certain grammatical points and may need to teach these points first.
2. Eric: Multiple Choice Discourse Completion Items on a Nationwide University Entrance Exam: Investigating the Reliability of Japan’s University Entrance Exam in English
Eric did a great job in making his presentation understandable to all of our classmates. As his project has a lot to do with quantitative methods that not many of us are familiar with, he used simple statistical words and gave a lot of examples in the presentation. His project showed his great effort in designing, testing and analyzing research items.
3. Tanny: The Effectiveness of Reading Supplemented with Word-Focused Activities on Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition and Retention
Similar to Shu Ling and Eric, Tanny also designed great research material. She made 5 different tests to investigate the effectiveness of word-focused activities in teaching reading. I agreed with Man-chiu’s comments that Tanny’s items which used Hawaiian vocabulary are very interesting.
4. Sachiyo: Japanese learners’ Perception and Attitude toward English Accent
Sachiyo used both survey methods and qualitative approach in her research. I really liked the way she integrated charts in presenting the research result which made it much easier for others to understand her points.
5. Man-chiu: Dynamics in Accent Familiarity, Comprehensibility, and Attitudes in Intercultural Acculturation —An investigation in an International Students’ Dormitory
Machiu is a great presenter. She was so energetic and I really like the way she used different font sizes in one slide in her power point. By doing that, her point of emphasizing L2 learner’s accent familiarity, comprehensibility and attitudes were really clearly distinguished from each other.
6. Hoa: Personality and Second Language Learning Belief: Two Sides of a Coin?
In this research, I used two questionnaire sets to investigate Vietnamese students’ personality and their L2 learning beliefs. The process of looking for those questionnaires was challenging but really helpful for me because I experienced the methods of doing survey research.
7. Ann: Comparing Teacher and Student Perceptions about Second Language Writing Feedback
Ann’s study was very interesting and showed a surprising result in which she showed that it was not the students at ELI who were concerned about teacher’s feedback but the English teachers themselves who were actually more concerned about how to give writing feedback to their students. Ann’s conclusion is that there is no best method in giving student’s feedback. As long as the teacher gives very consistent feedback (i.e.: they let the students know in advance what they are going to look at for each writing and give feedback to those points), the students are happy with that.
8. Ju-Young: Errors in Second Language Students’ Written and Spoken Texts: A Case Study of ESL College Students
The topic about student’s errors in L2 written and spoken texts has always been of great interest to language researchers and educators. Ju-Young had an intensive literature review on this topic. By examining L2 performance of two international students, she investigated the frequency and types of written and spoken errors produced by these two students.
9. Kyunghee: Becoming a Graduate Student: L2 Socialization and Acquisition of Appropriate Uses in a Graduate Program
Kyunghee raised a very interesting issue regarding a teacher’s role in students’ motivation through a case study of a graduate student in the US. The student’s changing motivation strongly related to her teacher’s feedback and attitude towards her. She suggested that teacher’s positive feedback to students is very important in shaping their students’ learning success. I totally agree with that and I also think that it is very crucial that the teacher give students’ constructive feedback. The teacher should point out both strengths and weaknesses of the students’ performance and give suggestions so that the students can improve their weaknesses.
10. Amelia: Same Same but Different: NNS and NS Students in a Tutoring Session
Amelia looked at the different dynamic in English writing tutoring sections among native speaker tutors and NS and NNS tutee. The tutors’ authority was investigated through 5 different kinds of questions during their conversation with their tutee and showed that the tutors showed more authority towards NNS tutee than towards NS tutee.
11. Kaz: Proficient & Less-Proficient Readers? How Metacognitive Knowledge Contributes to L2 Reading Performance
In this study, Kaz used a very interesting research approach in which he asked his participants to think aloud about the strategies that they use while they were doing a reading task. He was brave to take initiative to try out this well knowndifficult to conduct-method. It was very challenging for him to explain the think-aloud task to the participants and make sure that they did it in a correct way.
12. Atsumi: “I want to fit in”: Narratives of Japanese International Students in Adolescence -to Be a Successful Second Language Learner
As a high school English teacher in Japan herself, Atsumi realized the need for guidance of a huge population of Japanese high school students before they go to study abroad, which so far is not mentioned in the formal school setting. Through the Narrative approach with two Japanese students, she thinks that it is necessary that language teachers help raise awareness of identity negotiation to make a student successfully acquire knowledge in a foreign country.
Seeing those presentations, I was amazed of the diversity and quality of our classmate’s research papers. Not only were the topics very diverse but also the research methods. Some of us might have no idea of the research method that we are using now at the beginning of the semester but we have tried our best and learned a lot. The research showed great effort that we have made and great knowledge that we have gained over the last fifteen weeks. Thank you Dr. Ortega for being such a supportive and insightful teacher. I wish everyone luck with your final papers and have a great great summer!
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1 comment:
Thanks a lot for helping me out, Tanny!
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