Congratulations to Gavin Lamb, who is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher in RECLAS (Research Collegium for Language in Changing Society) co-run by the departments of Language and Communication Studies and the Center for Applied Language Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. ()

Gavin’s research is in the areas of nexus analysis, ecolinguistics, and intercultural communication in human-nature relationships. His current research projects aim to contribute to a ‘green applied linguistics’ that brings sociolinguistic research on language use, multilingualism and interculturality into dialogue with interdisciplinary research on both the positive and problematic relationships humans create with animals and the natural environment.

As a postdoctoral researcher, Gavin is collaborating on research projects applying multi-disciplinary language research methods to investigate environmental issues including climate activism, environmental education and human-animal interaction.  His position at the University of Jyväskylä runs from August through December 2019.

The post [PhD Graduate Updates] Dr. Gavin Lamb (2019), Post-Doctoral Researcher at University of Jyväskylä in Finland appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Fred Zenker
Testing for adjunct island effects using topic structures in L1 Chinese and L1/L2 English

Fulbright Spain Mid-year Conference (Feb 7th; Valencia, Spain)

Kristin Rock
Writing in the Digital World

Hawai’i TESOL Conference 2019 (Feb 16th; Laie, O’ahu)

R. L. Hughes
Task Supported Academic Writing: Pre- and Post-Task Development & Sequencing

University of Hawai’i – �鶹��ýSystem First Year Writing Symposium 2019 (March 2nd)

R. L. Hughes
Creatively Building a Student-Centered FYW Classroom: Task Supported Academic Writing

41st Language Testing Research Colloquium (March 4th – 8th; Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

Ruslan Suvorov
Examination of test-taking strategies used for two item types during L2 listening assessment

American Association of Applied Linguistics 2019 (March 9th – 12th; Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

Carrie Kristine Bach
“Omigosh lol It’s like me”: Emotions and cross-cultural affiliation on a Korean Facebook page

Ann Tai Choe
Complexity in L2 writing development: A complex dynamic systems theory perspective

Richard Day
The Component Skills of L2 Chinese Reading (with J. Zhou)

Christina Higgins
Localizing the global call center industry: Learning to serve customers in Hawai‘i (with G. Furukawa)

Chris Hunter
Critical English Language Teacher Identity and Practice in Japan: A Duoethnographic Exploration of Origins, Identities, and Obstacles (with Y. Nagashima)

Kristopher Kyle
Automatically assessing multiple features of lexical sophistication with TAALES

Geoffrey LaFlair
Identifying and understanding pragmatic language use in speaking assessments using corpus-based register analysis and systemic functional linguistics (with J. Egbert & S. Staples)

Hoa Vinh Le
A methodological review of L2 online, hybrid, and blended learning: Challenges and recommendations

Yu-Han Lin
Transition and Tradition in Taiwan: Family Relations During a Home Visit to a New Immigrant

Anna Mendoza
Confronting heritage plurilingualisms and cosmopolitan plurilingualisms in youth’s mixed language practices

Jayson Parba
Language Ideologies and Discourses of Philippine ELT on Webpages for Japanese EFL Learners (with T. Morikawa)

Patharaorn Patharakorn
Accomplishments in silence during a role-play assessment task: Construct irrelevance but interactional significance?

Parvaneh Rezaee
Membership in action: Identities in professional – client interaction

George Smith
The relationship between L2 vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension ability: A meta-analysis

Fred Zenker & Kristopher Kyle
Development of text length guidelines for the measurement of lexical sophistication
Investigating Minimum Text Lengths for Lexical Diversity Indices

Nicole Ziegler
The role of metacognitive instruction on interactional feedback in the L2 classroom: Examining learners’ perceptions and performance across multiple modalities (with K. Moranski)
Multi-site studies in SLA research: Challenges, risks, and rewards (with K. Moranski)

TESOL 2019: International Convention and English Language Expo (March 12th – 15th; Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

Betsy Gilliland
Preservice EFL Teachers’ Reflective Writing Assessed Through e-Portfolios
Response to Writing: Enduring Issues and New Frontiers
L2 Writing Pedagogy in Global Contexts: Challenges and Possibilities
Academic Writing Instruction for Bilingual/Multilingual Students

The 37th Conference of the Spanish Society for Applied Linguistics (March 27th – 29th; Valladolid, Spain)

Kristin Rock
The Role of Multilingualism in the Processing of Spanish Clitics

33rd Hawai’i Association of Language Teachers Spring Conference (April 13th; Honolulu, Hawai’i)

Jarrid Baldwin
Teacher Training Development in the Miami Tribe
Teaching and Learning Indigenous Languages with the �鶹��ýCreaDivLang Group

University of Hawai’i – 23rd Annual College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature Graduate Student Conference (April 20th)

R. L. Hughes
Vocabulary Building Tasks: SLA of Indonesian as a Foreign Language

Micah Mizukami
Preliminary Analysis of Positioning and Rapport Maintenance in Japanese Classes

University of Hawai’i – Spring 2019 Undergraduate Showcase (May 3rd)

Victoria Lee
Tracking Potential Attrition in a Child SecondLanguage Learner’s Phonological Development after a Change in Learning Environment

CALICO Conference 2019 (May 21st – 25th; Montréal, Québec, Canada)

Marta González-Lloret, J. Scott Payne and Mery Diez-Ortega
Gaming for Beginner Level Learners

Eunsun Lee
Synchronous Auto-Translation Tool as an Affordance in Online Bilingual Communication

Hanyang International Symposium on Phonetics and Cognitive Sciences of Language (May 24th – 25th; Seoul, Korea)

Haerim Hwang
Second language perception of English stops by Korean-speaking child learners: Effects of position and lexical knowledge

Interactional Competence and Practices in a Second Language (May 29th – 31st; Västerås, Sweden)

Ann Tai Choe
Epistemic Management in a Multiparty Conversation among L2 Speakers of English

16th International Pragmatics Conference (June 9th – 14th; Hong Kong)

Lin Chen
Getting Busy Doing Emotionality

Thinking, Learning, Doing 2019 Conference (June 17th – 19th; Jyväskylä, Finland)

Chau Truong
Dialectal Differences in a Vietnamese Heritage Classroom

The 2019 Conference of the International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (July 2nd – 5th; Mannheim, Germany)

Junichi Yagi
Embodied Activity Transitions in a Casual Studio Session

The 15th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Aug 6th – 11th; Nishinomiya, Japan)

Haerim Hwang & Hye Young Jung (with H. Kim)
How do different processes of speaking and writing affect syntactic complexity in child second language production?

The 4th International Conference on Ecolinguistics (Aug 12th – 15th; Odense, Denmark)

Kevin Rickman
Everyday Eco-literacy: Making an Impact (with Jen Noel Fabel)

2019 International Conference on Task-Based Language Teaching (Aug 19th – 21st; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)

Carrie Bach
A corpus approach to functional adequacy at different proficiency levels

Marta González-Lloret (Invited Colloquium Convener)
Technology-mediated tasks: Development, implementation, and assessment

Hoa Vinh Le
Exploring L2 learners’ task-related Identities in a reading circle task through conversation analysis
Task-based needs analysis for an EAP hybrid course

Mery Diez-Ortega
Cognitive complexity and technology-mediated TBLT: An analysis of tasks characteristics in a Spanish 3D game

Kristin Rock
Creating a rubric to fit the task: An academic blog post

Nicole Ziegler
Meta cognitive training in a computer mediated task-based environment (Invited Colloquium Speaker)
Miscommunication in Maritime English: Insights from a Task-Based Needs Analysis

Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching (Sept 12th – 14th; Flagstaff, Arizona)

Hitoshi Nishizawa
The Dynamics of L2 Speech: Intelligibility, Comprehensibility, Accentedness and Language attitudes

Second Language Research Forum (Sept 20th – 22nd; East Lansing, Michigan)

Dustin Crowther
Accentedness and comprehensibility as predictors of task performance: listeners’ scalar-based vs. raters’ rubric- based scoring
The Construct of Accuracy in Oral Language Production Studies (Invited Colloquium Speaker)
‘I thought if I ever went undercover in Russia’: Foreign Language Motivation in a Military Context (with Z. Miller)

Wenyi Ling & Theres Grüter
Learning words with lexical tone: Does cue contrastive training help?

Hitoshi Nishizawa
Comprehension and perception of non- native speech and listeners’ background

Kristen Urada & Precious Arao
Task-induced involvement for Filipino foreign language learners

The 44th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (Nov 7th – 10th; Boston, Massachusetts)

Haerim Hwang & Bonnie Schwartz
L2 acquisition of contrasts in interpretive ambiguity between VP ellipsis and gapping

The 18th Symposium on Second Language Writing (Nov 13th – 16th; Tempe, Arizona)

Kristin Rock
Designing an Analytic Rubric for an Online Writing Task

2019 Conference of the National Council of Teachers of English (Nov 21st – 24th; Baltimore, Maryland)

Anna Mendoza
Becoming inquirers: Examining the uses of inquiry in preservice teacher education (invited panelist)
Linguistic inquiries in English language arts classrooms

ACTFL 2019 Annual Convention and World Languages Expo (Nov 22nd – 24th; Washington, DC)

Adam Bramlett
Integrating Interactive Teaching Materials into Lower Level Chinese Class

The post SLS 2019 Faculty and Student Conference Presentations appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Click on the links to read the latest news from SLSSA!

SLS Newsletter #5: Spring 2019

SLSSA Newsletter #4: Fall 2018

SLSSA Newsletter #3: Spring 2018

SLSSA Newsletter #2: Spring 2017

SLSSA Newsletter #1: Fall 2016

Visit SLSSA’s webpage

The post SLS Newsletters appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Presenter: Christina Higgins, Professor & Graduate Chair, Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa

1. Navigating your MA progress
We will examine the MA advising form together and talk about optional tracks, core courses, seminar courses, and electives. Students will better understand what it takes to complete their degrees in a timely manner.
2. The relationship between language teaching and research
New students sometimes struggle to see connections between their interest in classroom teaching and research projects that they design and analyze in their courses; we will explore this and look at examples of research that are connected to teaching, as well as research on other topics in SLS that are not directly linked to classrooms.
3. Resources for academic and personal support
We will discuss the resources on campus that offer academic support (such as The Writing Center) as well as offices that offer counseling and other forms of support to students.

September 5

L2 Motivation Research: Recent Trends and How My SLS Dissertation Developed into Further Studies

Presenter: Chika Takahashi, Associate Professor, Ehime University, Japan

L2 motivation research has seen some developments as to its focus on individual learners and their dynamic changes that are often captured in longitudinal studies, including those examining learning languages other than English (LOTE). In this presentation, I will first discuss these trends in L2 motivation research. Then I will introduce two longitudinal studies that I conducted on the topic and discuss how those studies reflect the aforementioned developments of the field. The two participants were two of the high school students that took part in my dissertation, which I turned in to the Department of SLS in 2013. They are now very academically-oriented students at one of the top-tiered universities in Japan at the graduate level. They showed distinct patterns regarding the development of their English/LOTE motivation during the six years that I interviewed them, and these developments contrast with those reported in studies in the European contexts, where multilingualism is more highly valued than in Japan. This points to the importance of examining contextual factors when discussing English/LOTE motivation.

September 12

The importance of production for the acquisition of L2 grammatical structures

Presenter: Carrie Jackson, Professor of German and Linguistics, The Pennsylvania State University

An important question in instructed second language (L2) acquisition regards the relative effectiveness of comprehension-based instruction and production-based instruction for learning L2 grammatical forms. While recent meta-analyses (Shintani, 2015; Shintani, et al., 2013) show an immediate advantage of comprehension-based instruction for receptive knowledge and a long-term advantage of production-based instruction for productive knowledge, many questions remain regarding how these different instructional methods affect the underlying mechanisms that support L2 acquisition and use. In this talk I will present results from two recent studies investigating whether overt production promotes the acquisition and use of two different grammatical structures among L2 learners of German. In Study 1, 3^rd semester German learners completed a structural priming task targeting the production of sentence-initial adverbial phrases (e.g., Auf dem Berg trägt der Junge eine Jacke “On the mountain the boy wears a jacket” vs. Der Junge trägt eine Jacke auf dem Berg “The boy wears a jacket on the mountain”). After listening to prime sentences that contained sentence-initial adverbial phrases, participants who were required to repeat the prime aloud before describing a new picture produced significantly more sentences containing a sentence-initial adverbial phrases than participants who simply listened to the prime sentences before describing subsequent pictures. In Study 2, 1^st semester German learners completed a comprehension-based or production-based training unit targeting grammatical gender marking (e.g., ein blauer Becher “a_.MASC blue_.MASC cup_.MASC” vs. eine blaue Schüssel “a_.FEM red_.FEM bowl_.FEM”). The participants in the production-based training group outperformed the comprehension-based training group on all posttest measures. Together these studies highlight the importance of overtly producing target L2 grammatical forms during learning. I attribute this benefit for production to the cognitive mechanisms underlying language production, including utterance planning and lexical retrieval, and the need to maintain lexical and grammatical information in working memory while producing a sentence.

September 19

Collaboration between Forestry and Language Sciences for Building a Translanguaging Mixed Reality

Presenter: Dongping Zheng, Associate Professor, Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa

Team Members:
Dong, Jin, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu, United States of America
Liu, Yang, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Beijing, China
Melik Tangiyev, Denis, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu
Nokes, James, Independent Researcher, Wildwood, United States of America
Dr. Zhang, Huaiqing, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Beijing, China

This project is an intercultural, interdisciplinary, and transnational collaboration between language scientists in the United States and forestry scientists in China. Through our shared concern for ecological crises as well as the limitations placed on learners by object-based or synchronic systems (Cowley, 2017; van Love, 2017), we strive to help language learners establish harmonious and eco-mindful participation within multilingual societies that co-constitutively shape their multimodal languaging and translanguaging skills (Newgarden, Zheng, and Liu, 2015; Li, 2018).

Our team employed a mixed VR design to help realize these values in learners by establishing Bizhuwangshang, an emerging village meant to give learners the opportunity to explore the effects that humans have on their ecosystem while also discovering how mindful stewardship could be implemented. The VR space allows users to embody the world predicament both emotionally and relationally and then receive feedback by traveling into the future to see the impact of their choices (based upon forestry science impact models and projections). In the process of finding solutions to their environmental challenges, users will engage not only with members of their team but also with real-world artifacts such as National Geographic articles and other scientific pieces—all of which will provide ample opportunity for languaging and translanguaging.

In this informal Brown Bag Round Table, I will share how my previous research on designing and studying multi-user role-playing spaces and games lead to this project.

This project is funded by VISLAB, Chinese Academy of Forestry and UHM and Peking University Exchange Program.

October 3

Summer of 2019: Collaboratively building a Virtual reality Environment in Beijing

Presenter: Denis Melik Tangiyev, MA Student, Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa

In this talk, I will be discussing a recent Virtual Reality (VR) project that I began during my time in Beijing, China, thanks to the UHM-Peking exchange program. I was able to work closely with programmers in VISLAB. During my time, we began to build the foundations of what is now known as Bizhuwanshang, a fictional panda reserve set in South-West China. This virtual environment was developed to help show users the effects of climate change on the natural environment, as well as show how much of an impact humans could have on surrounding territories when expanding their influence. This project is meant to bridge a connection between the natural sciences and language sciences; allowing us to background the natural sciences while allowing users to experience ecolinguistics. VISLAB’s expertise allows us to demonstrate the effects of forest growth and animal habitation, which provides a rich scientific context for users. I will be discussing why language learners should broaden their sense of knowledge about the ecosystem and ecolinguistics. Our virtual world allows for users to experience these global changes, as well as attempt to make a difference; allowing them to collaborate in their target language.

October 10

Teaching and Living in Chile

Presenters: Betsy Gilliland, Associate Professor; & Amy Marquardt, SLS MA Graduate; Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa

Chile is a country of diverse terrain, located on the Pacific Coast of South America. SLS Associate Professor Betsy Gilliland and SLS MA graduate Amy Marquardt share stories of their recent experiences living and teaching here (Amy will join us via Zoom direct from Chile!). Come learn about life in the southern hemisphere, where people dance the cueca, eat asado and pastel de choclo, and study English as a foreign language.

Wednesday, October 16 – Special Presentation

Kialo Public Discussion Demo

Presenter: Jonathan McKinney, Kialo Education Consultant, University of Cincinnati, Departments of Philosophy and Psychology Center for Cognition, Action & Perception

Learn about Kialo, described by Common Sense Media as “a troll-free zone for student discussion and debate.”

Kialo is a public discussion platform designed to facilitate reasoned online debates about complex topics. Since 2017, it has grown to host thousands of debates and millions of user contributions.

While Kialo is a debate platform, Kialo Edu is focused on providing resources for educators and creating an online space for students to work through and visualize complex subjects together.

This demo will introduce the basic features of kialo.com plus sample lesson plans and assignments drafted for Kialo Edu. Please join us with your feedback and questions about the Kialo educational platform.

This event is co-organized by the Center for Language & Technology and the Department of Second Language Studies.

October 17

Multi-ʻōlelo: A multilingual platform for language-related research dissemination

Presenters: The Multi-ʻōleloTeam: Huy Phung, Mery Diez-Ortega, Masaki Eguchi, Anna Mendoza, Thu Ha Nguyen, Ann Choi & Raquel Reinagel; Past and current students, Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa

Academic research is important, but the findings are usually limited to small circles of scholars and experts. Traditional forms of scholarship, such as journal articles, are generally not easy for non-specialist readers. Hence, alternative forms of scholarship are needed if that knowledge is meant to be shared outside academia. Moreover, due to the widespread and hegemonic nature of English, impactful research works are often mainly published in English, which not only limits the access opportunities for many non-English-using people, but also devalues the significance of local languages and other ways of sharing research findings. Thus, accessible research findings published in multiple languages are also necessary. Multi-ʻōlelo is an online platform that facilitates the interaction among various stakeholders, including graduate students, researchers, practitioners and teachers, policy-makers, administrators, and other people invested in language-related matters. These people can contribute to Multi-ʻōlelo by submitting their own content, which will be peer-reviewed and posted on Multi-ʻōlelo. Later, the content can be disseminated to the community and all practitioners more easily than traditional journals or other academic texts. Content can include original research findings, reviews or reactions to research, infographics, videos, podcasts, slides, and other media that centers around language learning, language teaching, and use. Although started in the Department of Second Language Studies, the project hopes to recruit content creators from other departments and eventually other institutions.

October 24

The Advancement of Open Science in SLA: Current Trends

Presenter: Dustin Crowther, Assistant Professor, Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa

Recent years have seen an increased emphasis on open science within SLA (and applied linguistics more generally), a movement which is aimed “at enhancing transparency in research methods, observation, data collection, data access, and communication of findings” which in turn “provides important mechanisms for enhancing the validity, credibility, and reliability of scientific endeavors” (Marsden, Morgan-Short, Trofimovich, & Ellis, 2018, p. 310).
For those looking to publish in major field journals such as Language Learning, Modern Language Journal, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and TESOL Quarterly, it is unlikely that you will avoid reference to open science initiatives, including

• making datasets and materials publicly available, such as through the IRIS Digital Repository or the Open Science Framework;
• providing accessible summaries, such as those published through OASIS;
• pursuing preregistered reports, which ensures transparency throughout the research process; and
• implementation of open science badges as a means to promote continued open science practices.

I will provide a brief review of the benefits of pursuing open science, where we are today with regards to the aforementioned open science practices, and how we can begin/continue to contribute with our own scholarly work.

October 31

(via video-teleconference)

Presenter: Susan Bobb, Associate Professor of Psychology, Gordon College, Wenham, MA
Co-Presenter: Kathrin Rothermich, Associate Professor, Communication Sciences & Disorders, East Carolina University

Immigrants and non-native speakers in the US face communicative challenges when interacting with native speakers in everyday life, for example at the workplace, in a healthcare setting, and in educational environments. One strategy frequently employed by native speakers to ensure smooth communication is speech accommodation in the form of foreigner-directed speech. According to sociolinguistic frameworks such as Communication Accommodation Theory, English native speakers modify their speech to meet the communicative needs of non-native speakers (Beebe & Giles, 1984). However, when foreigner-directed speech is used inappropriately, it may lead to overaccommodation, which in turn can act counterproductively towards communicative goals and learning and may be perceived as disrespectful, condescending, or patronizing.

To date, much of the research on foreigner directed speech toward non-native speakers has focused on its acoustic parameters, but few studies have examined how second language learners interpret it emotionally and pragmatically. In this talk, we present data from a series of experiments with adult English language learners, examining: 1) the communicative needs of non-native speakers, 2) the emergence of speech accommodation in natural interactions, as well as 3) the perception of speech accommodation by non-native speakers. We also consider the role of language proficiency and personality profiles as predictors for the effects of speech accommodation.

November 7

Laissez Faire Translanguaging in Two High School English Classes

Presenter: Anna Mendoza, PhD Candidate, Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa

This linguistic ethnography aims to investigate what multilingual practices arise in high school English classrooms where teachers freely permit the use of languages other than English but do not explicitly teach students to use these languages as learning resources—i.e., deliberate translanguaging pedagogy. Many K-12 teachers are convinced that students learn best when allowed to use their entire linguistic repertoires. However, they may not teach students to translanguage for various reasons, such as the belief that they will not be able to balance the needs of monolingual and multilingual students, classroom management issues when students speak languages apart from English, especially when the teacher doesn’t understand all of them, and monolingual curricula and assessments. Therefore, letting students draw on other languages in whatever ways they feel they need to—a laissez faire language policy—may seem an appealing middle ground between “English only” and deliberate translanguaging pedagogy.

The teachers in this study, a Filipino-American man in his 20s and a Japanese-American woman in her 40s, are similar to many English teachers in the U.S. They do not react negatively when they hear languages other than English in class and encourage students to talk things through in these languages. Since they are not teaching in bilingual programs, they do not require students to produce bi/multilingual artifacts showing that they are translanguaging to learn; however, an abundance of multilingual talk can be heard in their classrooms, because they do not wish to deprive students of the resource of their L1s, they value students’ funds of knowledge, and they are multilingual and multicultural themselves. In their classrooms, I investigated the following questions:

1. What are the different types of mixed language practices that emerge under a laissez faire language policy?
2. Why do some students reap the benefits of translanguaging more than others under such a policy?
3. What kinds of translanguaging practices appear to arise instinctively, and which do not seem to occur without deliberate pedagogical scaffolding?

In other words, my study aims to capture how a laissez faire language policy interacts with students’ beliefs about translanguaging, the classroom ecology, and larger societal discourses, impacting opportunities to learn.

November 14

Pathway into Graduate School: A discussion of the options

Presenters: Magdelena Petko and Victoria Lee, MA Students, Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa

The purpose of this session is to familiarize undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty in the SLS department with the rich opportunities the SLS department provides for all its members. From our unique perspectives as the former and first cohort of the BA/MA pathway, we’d like to share our experiences and hear from the audience about their familiarity navigating these diverse programs, whether it’d be from the angle of the undergraduate, graduate, or faculty level. After a brief informational presentation about the pathway program and our experiences, we’d like to open up the floor for the audience to ask questions. In an interactive activity, we would like to draw on the audience to contribute to this session by connecting with each other to enable potential future MA and BA/MA pathway students to interconnect with MA students and faculty. Lastly, we hope that everyone will walk away from the session with a widened perspective of the different paths our department has to offer for our diverse student population.

November 21

Multimodal Practices of Resistance: Refusing to drink in a Residential Home

Presenter: Yu-Han Lin, PhD Student, Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa

When encountering institutional resistance from care recipients, caregivers may struggle between preserving the rights of the care recipients while accomplishing health and safety-related tasks under the institutional agenda (Finlay et al., 2008). This work-in-progress examines the interactional organization of drinking: How do caregivers manage resistance from care recipients in drinking or finishing water or nutritional drinks, which multimodal practices are involved as a consequence, and what is the role of language in multilingual interaction? The data consisted of 48-hour video recordings in a multifunctional room at a private Taiwanese residential home. Participants included elderly care recipients, Taiwanese and Vietnamese caregivers, nurses, interns, volunteers, and visitors. The languages included L1 and L2 Mandarin Chinese (Mandarin) and Taiwanese Southern Min (Taiwanese). Guided by multimodal conversation analysis (CA) (Mondada, 2014, 2018, 2019), preliminary findings suggest that caregivers persist in their requests by recycling requests through talk or embodiment (e.g., moving a mug towards the care recipient), embedding the drinking practice in a game, negotiating with the care recipients (e.g., “one more time” in Mandarin), or complying with them in a dispreferred way (e.g., silence and leaving). Specifically, despite their language fluency, caregivers deploy the preferred language of their care recipients to defuse resistance and construct affiliation. This study shows the significance of multimodal CA in scrutinizing elderly care interaction and has practical implications for training caregivers in managing resistance. Care recipients with cognitive or physical deficiencies manifest their interactional competence through various semiotic resources. Moreover, observing language use in a “larger theory of human interaction” (Wagner, 2018) among participants, this study delineates the fluidity of language use despite limited knowledge of co-participant’s language (Jansson et al., 2017; Lindholm, 2017). The larger goal lies in informing staff training in order to allow for better caregiving service quality, and ultimately the well-being of care recipients.

December 5

Teach in Thailand: Informational Meeting About the Summer 2020 Practicum

Presenter: Betsy Gilliland, Associate Professor, Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa

Have you wanted to get more experience teaching English for academic purposes for university students? Are you curious about what it’s like to teach students with whom you don’t share an L1? Do you want to try doing action research in your own classroom? If you join us for the summer 2020 Thailand practicum, you can do all this and more! This brown bag session will explain what the practicum is and what opportunities you can have if you join us.  Dr. Gilliland will provide an overview of the graduate class that she will teach and how the program will be structured. Then several current and former SLS graduate students will tell stories and share pictures from their experiences.

Note: If you are interested in participating in the practicum but can’t make it to this session, please email Dr. Gilliland to let her know.

December 12

Demotivation in Second Language Acquisition: Insights from a Study on Spanish Vocabulary Acquisition

Presenters: Keita Kikuchi, Kanagawa University, Japan; &

María del Carmen Méndez Santos, Universitat d’ Alacant, Spain

Kikuchi (2005), in extensively discussing the topic of demotivation in Second Language Acquisition, points out the need to clarify the focus of demotivation research in our field and to distinguish three terms; demotivation, demotivators, and demotivated. At the beginning of the talk, we present developments in this research topic.

Next, we present a study of vocabulary acquisition in learning Spanish as a foreign language. There is an increasing attention to vocabulary learning due to the rise of lexical approaches (Lewis, 1993, 1997; Nation, 2001; Thornbury, 2002; Laufer, 2005; Barcroft, 2015, among others). It is important to know of any specific demotivators related to vocabulary learning. For instance, Hu (2011) confirmed that students from Taiwan found vocabulary learning demotivating in her study because they considered themselves to be “bad at memorizing.”

Along the same vein as Arefinezhad and Golaghaei (2014) in Iran on demotivation in learning vocabulary, one of the presenters has performed a pilot study regarding Spanish as a foreign language. The results are presented as well as pedagogical implications. To conclude the presentation, future directions for further study on the topic of demotivation are given.

The post Archive Fall 2019 Brown Bags appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Victoria Lee, a student in the BAMA pathway program in SLS, presented her research in the Spring 2019 Undergraduate Showcase (Undergraduate Research and Creative Work) on May 3, 2019 at the East-West Center.  

Victoria’s presentation, “Tracking Potential Attrition in a Child SecondLanguage Learner’s Phonological Development after a Change in Learning Environment”, was the culmination of several semesters of research and an award from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).  The purpose of the study was to examine whether second language (L2) attrition would occur in “K”, a L2-English 8-year-old child whose first language (L1) was Japanese.  K spent seven months in Hawaii, and then returned to Japan.  Victoria looked at the short-term changes in K’s production of two minimal consonantal pairs in English that are not contrastive in Japanese (/l/-/ɹ/, /b/-/v/). Findings from the study showed no obvious evidence of attrition in K’s production over the five months after his return to Japan, but later studies could look at K’s production a year or two after his return for evidence of attrition.

The post SLS BAMA Student Victoria Lee Presents at Spring 2019 Undergraduate Showcase appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

Hyunwoo Kim completed his dissertation on “Cross-linguistic activation in Korean L2 learners’ processing of remention bias in English” in December 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Theres Grüter.

The post SLS PhD Graduate Hyunwoo Kim accepts position at Yonsei University appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

==============================================================

Minor in Language Teaching

The Minor in Language Teaching would provide instruction in fundamental concepts related to second language learning and teaching. It would consist of 18 credits in total: 9 credits of core courses and 9 credits of electives.

Upon completing the minor, students would be able to:

• Demonstrate a general understanding of the field of second language studies
• Plan and effectively deliver lessons
• Reflect on and evaluate their teaching practices
• Support students’ development of oral language and literacies
• Assess and evaluate student learning

==============================================================

Minor in Second Language Studies

The Minor in Second Language Studies would provide instruction in fundamental concepts related to second language learning, use, structure, and pedagogy. It would consist of 15 credits in total: 9 credits of core courses and 6 credits of electives.

Upon completing the minor, students would be able to:

• Demonstrate a general understanding of the field of second language studies
• Demonstrate an understanding of how languages develop, are learned, and are used
• Critically evaluate and make use of research into the learning, use, structure, and pedagogy of second languages

The post Possibly Coming Soon! appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

PhD in Second Language Studies Dissertation Defense

Elham Monfaredi

Occasioned Storytelling in Persian Language Classroomss

Chair: Gabriele Kasper

Wednesday May 8, 8:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Moore Hall, 155A

Abstract

The use of stories as pedagogical tools in second language (L2) classrooms has a longstanding research tradition (e.g. Huang, 2006; Inal & Cakir, 2014). In these studies, stories are deployed as prepackaged instructional tools that are incorporated into lesson plans and embedded in the overall pedagogical concept. However, the ways in which stories figure as naturally occurring activities in L2 classroom interaction remains an understudied research topic. This investigation utilizes a conversation analytic approach in which storytelling is viewed as a social, situated activity that is locally occasioned, collaboratively accomplished, and interactionally consequential. Specifically, the study examines how impromptu stories unfold during ongoing instructional activities and what actions they accomplish in L2 classroom settings.

The data come from 37 hours of videorecorded intermediate and advanced Persian classes at two North American universities. For analysis, multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada, 2014) and membership categorization analysis (Sacks, 1972; Fitzgerald & Housley, 2015; Hester & Eglin, 1997) are combined to examine the sequential and categorial production of stories told by teachers and students.

In the corpus of stories told by the teachers, stories are launched in first position to exemplify, elaborate, or extend upon the ongoing pedagogical project, and in second position to provide counter examples and accounts, or to reject or accept students’ proposals. In contrast, students’ stories begin in responsive positions to accomplish actions such as giving accounts and bringing their cultural competencies and membership knowledge to the forefront. The findings also demonstrate that stories typically orient to the current pedagogical agenda or accomplish a particular instructional action. The study enhances applied linguistic knowledge about storytelling as a social practice in ongoing classroom interaction and thus contributes to the large field of second language classroom research. It also contributes to the scant research literature on instruction in Persian as a foreign language and begins to place pedagogical practice in the teaching of Persian on an empirical footing.

The post May 8: Dissertation Defense – Elham Monfaredi appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

PhD in Second Language Studies Dissertation Defense

Gavin Lamb

The nexus of discourse and practice in sea turtle tourism and conservation at Laniākea Beach, Hawai‘i

Chair: Christina Higgins

Wednesday, April 3, 9:30 a.m.– 11:30 a.m.
Moore Hall, 258

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the discursive practices emerging in the overlapping contexts of sea turtle tourism and conservation at Laniākea Beach, Hawai‘i which serve to produce the local activities, linguistic practices, and intercultural relations between international tourists and conservation volunteers around sea turtles at this beach. By examining tourist-volunteer interaction, volunteers’ training to use an educational discourse of sea turtle outreach, and interviews with volunteers, tourists and other stakeholders in the community, I ask how the wider discourses of sea turtle tourism and conservation converge at this beach to produce the actions and identities people construct around endangered wildlife like sea turtles. Using nexus analysis as an ethnographic sociolinguistic approach to discourse analysis, I investigate what exactly happens in situ in volunteer-tourist interaction as a key site to understand how intercultural identities of inclusion and exclusion and community membership in relation to sea turtles are produced. I take up this investigation primarily from the perspective of honu guardians, or sea turtle conservation volunteers, as they work to carry out their sea turtle educational and protection efforts at Laniākea Beach. But I also examine how tourists move through, interact with and talk about sea turtles as well in this beachspace, as the volunteer efforts to protect sea turtles at this beach only emerged in parallel with a growing sea turtle tourism industry promoting Laniākea Beach as a popular tourist destination. Here, I trace how honu guardians and turtle tourists circulate conservation and tourism discourses through their embodied, interactional and digital practices at this beach to explore the hybrid and creative discursive practices emerging at this sea turtle tourism-conservation nexus. Ultimately, the aim of this dissertation is to address the emerging ‘posthumanist’ question of how people are becoming caught up with animals and nature through their semiotic practices, and what new discourses and intercultural relations are emerging as a result, particularly in an era when there is a heightened awareness of cultural differences and sameness in regard to human relations with the natural world. Overall, then, my research adds to a growing body of work in ecolinguistics on the discursive representations of animals and nature, and in sociolinguistics on the discursive practices of intercultural communication in the contexts of wildlife conservation and international ecotourism.

The post April 3: Dissertation Defense – Gavin Lamb appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.

PhD in Second Language Studies Dissertation Defense

Jay Tanaka

Qualitative Content Analysis of Reflection in Language Teacher Practicum Settings

Chair: Elizabeth Gilliland

Friday, March 1, 1:30 p.m.– 3:30 p.m.
Moore Hall, 258

Abstract

At least one element of second language teacher education (L2TE) permeates contextual differences: reflection. Farrell (2012) suggests that the terms reflection and reflective practice are now mandatory terms used within in L2TE program curricula. Teacher learners (TLs) commonly engage in reflective assignments such as teacher journals and group discussions. However, there has been a lack of sufficiently data-led investigations into the content and nature of TL reflections (Mann & Walsh, 2017), with most taking the form of self-reports or short extracts from teacher reflection journals. While such studies provide important insights from the perspectives of language teacher reflection researchers within unique contexts, more structured, qualitative content analysis (Schreier, 2012) provides the valuable ability to systematically compare reflection across contexts and individual cases. This is crucial for building a richer understanding of language teacher reflection generally.

The current study investigates the reflection of 17 TLs across two distinct practicums. Variation in the amount of reflection in different topics and the amount of reflection that included the act of referencing sources of information was analyzed across individual TLs, and across four different reflection assignments (reflective journals, final papers, group discussions, and observation debriefs). Findings revealed a generally high concentration of reflection on teaching actions related to the content and structure of lesson activities; however, reflection in final papers featured a greater variety of topics than in other reflection assignment data. With respect to referencing, TLs with professional teaching experience had low frequencies of references to their experiences as language learners. In addition, the general amount of referencing sources of information in reflection was found to be different across individual TLs. The overall findings illustrate that referencing is an important aspect of TL reflection, and I argue for an explicit focus on this concept within L2TE, encouraging the diversification of the kinds of sources TLs reference in their reflection. Similarly, I also argue for efforts toward the diversification of TL reflection among various topics related to language teaching.

The post March 1: Dissertation Defense – Jay Tanaka appeared first on Department of Second Language Studies.