Siwon's dissertation

Today I went to Siwon's dissertation defense. I am very impressed with his statistical analysis. In Siwon's work, I see both the strengths and weaknesses that we share together. In a sense we both favor manipulating statistics, using new methodologies to investigate research questions. On the contrary, we think less of what our analysis will contribute to the theoretical knowledge in our field. Some of the comments from committee are worth noting:
1. Organization: JD pointed out that discussion and conclusion should be made separate sections. Discussion will bring back the literature and situate the findings in the current research in the bigger research finding context. Conclusion is a summary of the answers to the research questions and also answer the "so what" question.

2. Theoretical issue: construct needs to be defined, from both literature and practical reasons. Think in terms of both theoretical conceptualization and the intended use of the construct. Maybe it makes more sense to justify the choice of tasks based on the intended use of the assessment and its implication.

3. Methodological issue:
(1) About using Multitrait-Multimethod confirmatory factor analysis (MTMM). JD commented that in language testing literature, methods almost never showed up as a separate effect in MTMM analysis, except for

Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (1982). The Construct Validation of Some Components of Communicative Proficiency. TESOL Quarterly, 16(4), 449-465.

Siwon's research also demonstrated clear method effect. However, it may be questioned that the method effect is probably due to the different rating conditions (spontaneous vs. post hoc) by the judges, rather than the difference between task types.

(2) John cautioned about the interpretation of the significant result. He suggested to also report effect size, because significance is not equal to meaningfulness.
(3) It is also recommended that the vocabulary diversity should be calculated by D parameter. I made a simple tutorial and published it online: http://ourmedia.org/node/366283.
(4) Siwon was also recommended to derive participants' English proficiency level from the complexity measurement of their oral production.
(5) It would be nice to include narration as a different genre in the speaking tasks.

It's amazing how much I learned from Siwon's defense!

tips for organizing blog

If it is a class blog using blogger, it's important to ask students to label their posts with their name besides label it according to content so that they can find their own posts or a particular student's post immediately.

I think too much time has been spent on theories in this class. If I am to teach it again, I am going to limit the theory portion of it to one or two weeks, starting with Fotos and Browne Chapter 1 and 2.
The move on to learning blog, wiki, webquest, cultura project with an academic paper written on it.
(two-three weeks)

The introduce audio (Audacity), video (Movie-making), followed by photo story, camstudio, powerpoint and podcasting.
(four weeks)

In the end testing (Hot-potatos) and online survey (Survey Monkey).
(two weeks)

Maybe a little web design in the end.
(2 weeks)

Student presentation and evaluation
(1 week)

418 class 082407

Today is the third class of 418. It was raining hard. I got wet and late for my class for several minutes. It was not a pleasant beginning. I went to class upset.

The class turned my mood around. I got very smooth when delivering my lecture and I think students were engaged. I spent about 40 minutes on the PowerPoint, where I plan to spend 20. Students are slower and less enthusiastic to respond then I anticipated. All of them are Asian students. However, it is a pleasant class. I think I successfully create a non-threatening environment. I point to a corner of students, usually 3-4 to respond, rather than pointing to a particular student.

There are several reasons that I can think of about the lack of students' response:
1. Students are from Asian culture where students' role were passive and teachers dominating the lecture.
2. My lecture, or me, may give the students an impression of rushing through. I do have an agenda. I can not wait for 10 seconds before calling on someone every time. However, this may students the impression that if no one respond, I'll just quit and answer the question myself instead.
3. For non-native speakers, they are probably afraid about making language mistakes in responding to content questions.
4. They did not read the assigned reading, and maybe afraid to answer completely wrong, which is obviously the case of my of my student today.

Solutions:
1. Give students discussion questions in advance, and give them the option to select only two or three to answer.
2. Encourage students to not be afraid of making mistakes.
3. Ask fewer questions and give students longer wait time for them to respond.

I had only 5 minutes left in the end to talk about the chunking tool. Students liked my example it seems but they still seemed uncertain. I would if I were a student--there is no example, no instruction on discourse analysis--the instructor is rushing when explaining the homework. I end up finishing my chunking tool example and send it to all the students.

Next class, I can discuss with my students as how to use the chunking tool with language learners and generate workshop ideas for my students.

It may also be a good idea to generate a list of common grammar points for students to use in their chunking tool. Otherwise, when they see a grammatical phenomenon, they may not know how to call them. Teachers don't need to be grammarian but they should have some knowledge of pedagogical grammar. I think I can read Shaw and Liu and generate a list from there.

I felt happy when I walked out of my class. Teaching is profound to one's spirit.

Oatmeal recipe

Check this out: Easy Crust Apply Recipe .

first week of teaching 418

Today is the second day that I started teaching 418. The class is held in the faculty development lab. The immediate trouble that I can see from using this lab is that students in the back of the room can hardly see what's on the presentation screen. I think I should offer them the opportunity to view whatever is on the screen also on their computer.

Well, how did the class go? It's not as full as I planned. We spent the first hour of the class trying to signing for the blog. Many students sloved the problem by themelves, but in the end there were still three students who had trouble. I speculate the problems that they were having is probably because they used the school email account, which has all sorts of restrictions. Now, all but one student can comment in the class blog.

We spent the last fifteen minute talking about the chunking tool in Meskill (2002). The rationale for its use is that language is not just bits and pieces of syntax and vocabulary, rather it's specific language used in the specific situations or context. As language teachers, we may need to be very observant as how language is used in real life communication and record the language chunks (e.g., How are you? It's good to see you here. etc.) or even though the full sequence of a social communication phenonena. The example that I showed my student is an 30-second exerpt from Start Trek: Next Generation. It's when caption Picard welcoming the new intern on the Enterprise. In this exerpt, the overarching sociafunction of the interaction is welcoming a new-coming, but there are a lot of speech acts to different micro functions, such as compliment, self-effacing, leave taking, etc. All need to be taken as a whole as a baseline to understand each utterance and the syntax and vocabulary components. In other words, language need to be taught in an "organic way" not contrived.

The following is a template for the chunking tool. One could imagine that a database can be built over a long time of observation.

The Chunking Tool
Learners:
Topic:
Situation:
Function(s):
Structure(s):
Lexis:
Skills foci:
Cultural notables:
Special expressions/idioms:
Medium/materials:
The chunk:

The homework for my students is for them to find a piece of media and complete one set of chunking tool. I plan to ask them to share in pairs of their media and chunking tool.

About time management: I think in each class session, I should spend at least 20 minutes on lectures and the rest on hands-on.

Chinese pod

Chinesepod is a place where Chinese learners can subscribe and get a daily Chinese lesson. I clicked on a couple of lessons and it seems to be free, though my colleague told me that now they start charging money for it. There is one hostess, who sounds like a native speaker of Chinese and one host, who is most certainly a native speaker of English.
I would recommend it to my husband because I think it really suits his learning style, in other words, old fashioned. Every lesson is presented in a linear fashion: first two hosts will introduce the topic, and then there is a dialog, read three times. After which, each sentence is translated and explained and then each word is explained. In the end the dialog will be played another three times. However, I do like one feature of it: socialcultural explanation of the expressions. They will explain whether a certain expression is used for only a certain gender, age, or social class group or in a certain occasion. Sometimes, even though the dialog sounds very contrived, the hostess or the host will explain: "Oh, that's not really how we say it." or something like that. I also like the fact that translations given by the host is very nice. He would first give a literal translation, then variations of it, and then how Americans express it. I actually think it's a good English learning resource.

One more feature I like this place is that, up to today, it has 614 lessons already categorized into different learning levels. I think the second level: elementary will really benefit my husband.

First Error Correction Class

Today is the first day of SLS 750 seminar. We have 14 students in the class, 4 or 5 or them are Ph.D. students. I expect it to be a great class. Two students share the similar interests with me. Yuki is interested in individual differences and David is in technology.

Interesting things that I learned from the instructor today include:
1. There are two trends of technology mediated error correction:
(1) computer as tutor: Computers give intelligent feedback. Students go through those tutorials one-on-one. It represent the behavioristic approach toward language teaching.
(2) synchronous chat, which more align with more contemporary language teaching philosophy. However the analytic method is more or less a direct copy of that used in analyzing face to face interaction.It seems that multimodality or new literacy approach may better suit as analysis method.
2. The evidence for the effectiveness of error correction is very sporadic. However, it is unlikely that a certain way of doing error correction is a--what's the word, meaning cure for everything?--The questions left to be answered are: when, how and with whom that we should do error correction.
3. The concept of nativeness. Do we give error correction because the learners' production is not native-like? Are the native speakers the standard against whom we should correct our learners? If not, whose standard? Who have the right for the error correction.