August 27: Job Hunting During and After Your Studies
Presenters: Ray Allen, ISS Advisor; Priscilla Faucette, ELI Associate Director & SLS Undergraduate Advisor; and Emily Lee, SLS Program Specialist & Employment Officer, UHM
What are the employment opportunities within SLS and outside of the department? What are the visa requirements for on- and off-campus work for international students? Which language schools on O‘ahu require a BA or an MA for their instructors? What is the difference between PPT and PTT in the Hawai‘i Department of Education? What is the “student advantage” when it comes to job hunting? Which languages are taught in which private K–12 schools? Find out the answers to these questions, and consider how to find your best “fit” for connecting practice with research and coursework.
September 3: Welcome to SLS – A Discussion and Q&A with Current SLS Graduate Students
Organized by SLSSA Academic VPs
Panelists: MA Students Wonguk Cho, Emily Gazda, Bozheng Liao, Huy Phung, and Kezhu Wang; and PhD Student Jayson Parba
For the second Brown Bag of the Fall 2015 semester, SLSSA’s Academic VPs will be organizing a panel of returning SLS students on the topic of life as a graduate student in the SLS program. The panel guests will first talk about their own experiences within the program, and have a general discussion about transitioning into their lives as graduate students. After that, new students will be encouraged to ask questions of their own to the panel guests to better understand the challenges and opportunities to be gained from pursuing a degree in the SLS program as well as choosing to become a student again.
September 10: Spotlight on Multilingualism in Hawai‘i: Student-produced Videographies in a Second Language Studies Course
Participants: See program.
Organizer: Angela Haeusler, UHM; ‘Oihana Maika‘i Fund Awardee
This presentation involves the first public screening of four movies that students in the SLS programs produced during a summer-intensive course on globalization and language teaching (“SLS 480P”). The short clips portray from various angles the tension between linguistic diversity as an accepted and neglected reality in Hawai‘i. They also examine the particular role of English in this constellation, as a local and global communication tool.
With the student-producers present, the format of this Brown Bag is intended to create an interactive platform for discussion on the topics portrayed in each clip. We further seek to offer insights into the production process and personal impacts, evaluating the usefulness of student-created videographies as a tool in language teacher education and for language-related advocacy.
Please refer to the program below for the titles of the movies and the names of the students who produced them.
Spotlight on Multilingualism in Hawai‘i – Program
September 24: Secondary English Language Education Reforms in Korea
Presenter: Young Shik Lee, Professor, Department of English Language Education, College of Education, Hannam University, Korea
Throughout the last decade, secondary English language education in Korea has experienced vast changes in an effort to increase the effectiveness of language teaching and work towards globalization. To understand the current system, it is important to examine the innovations that have been made in order to achieve those objectives. This study reviews the five major reforms that have been implemented with the idea of improving the quality of instruction and meeting the ever increasing need for globalization. These are as follows: 1) the revision of the National Curriculum of English, 2) the employment of native English speaking teachers (EPIK), 3) the reinforcement of teaching English in English (TEE), 4) changes of the English teacher employment exam for secondary schools, and 5) the attempts to implement the national test of English.
October 1: Teach in Thailand – Informational Meeting About the Summer 2016 Graduate Practicum
Presenters: Betsy Gilliland, Assistant Professor, UHM, with past participants
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 2016 Thai 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 two graduate classes 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 2016 practicum but can’t make it to this session, please email Dr. Gilliland to let her know.
October 8: Civic Engagement, Language Advocacy, and Professionalism: Presenting Written and Oral Testimony in Hawaiʻi
Guest Speaker: Cheryl Kaʻuhane Lupenui, The Leader Project; former member of the Hawaiʻi State Board of Education
Presenters: Angela Haeusler & Samuel Aguirre, UHM
In this presentation, former member of the Hawai‘i State Board of Education (BOE), Cheryl Kaʻuhane Lupenui, joins us to offer first-hand insights on the effect of public testimony in language policy-making in Hawai‘i. Testimonies are a form of professional and civic engagement afforded to all people residing in the United States regardless of their citizenship status. Oral and written testimony can lead to impactful results on policies that affect our linguistically diverse communities. This was exemplified earlier this year by the wide range of support from individuals and organizations for a State Seal of Biliteracy, which, after multiple revisions, also based on testimony input, was approved by the BOE. A unique opportunity to glimpse behind the legislative curtain, Ms. Lupenui will help us envision how students and faculty can make their expertise on language and multilingualism relevant to the creation of educational policies in Hawai‘i.
The workshop component of the Brown Bag focuses on the process of submitting and presenting written and oral testimony at the Hawai‘i State Board of Education and the Hawai‘i State Legislature. Using past and current language legislation as examples, we will explain how students, faculty, and other language professionals can respond to proposed policies and structure their arguments in effective ways to advocate for multilingual education and linguistic diversity. Embrace your kuleana as a community member and language professional by getting involved in the policy process!
October 15: [Practice Talk] Place-based Language Learning Using Mobile Technology
A Case Study with International Students of an Intensive English Program
Agency Construction Through Agentic Learning via Mobile Technology
Presenters: Yang Liu, Dan Holden, & Jared Tomei, UHM
By utilizing a combination of theories of place-based learning and mobile technology, the research team at the University of Hawai‘i was able to implement their design-based research into a real world game for a target group of international students in an intensive English program. During the process, the game went through several iterations that were directly influenced by all of the stakeholders involved in the outcome of the project. Due to this unique distributed process of design, the game was able to be built and rebuilt with specific learners in mind, while at the same time introducing them to a local and physical context.
This presentation will all delineate the relationship between play, language learning, and agency through mobile-assisted gameplay. Using a eco-dialogically grounded multimodal analysis, we report process of learning by tracing players’ deployment of artifacts to locate meaning and realize values that matter to learners, the group members, and the social surroundings.
October 22: [Practice Talk] Student Perceptions of Native and Non-native English Teacher Accents
Presenters: Bozheng Liao & Jessie Fast, UHM
Research in EFL contexts has demonstrated learner preference for native speaker teachers as pronunciation models. However, research has yet to investigate if ESL learner perceptions of the accents of non-native English teachers has implications on their perceptions of their own language development. The current study examines learners’ perceptions of various accented Englishes and the possible impacts of these accent perceptions on learner perceptions of their learning. Preliminary results demonstrate that learners rated the native speaker speech they perceived to be comprehensible, even when it was ungrammatical, more highly than grammatical samples from speakers with non-native accents. Following a grounded theory approach, qualitative analyses of the interview data revealed that although participants believed native speaker teachers were superior English users, many also believed non-native speaker teachers understand their situation as language learners better. In addition, as long as a teacher’s accent is deemed comprehensible, participants claimed no bias towards either native or non-native speaker teachers. Findings are discussed in terms of possible connections between learner preference for particular accents and perceived effects on their own language learning.
November 5: Researching Chinese as a Global Language: Trends, Issues, and Opportunities
Presenter: Patricia A. Duff, Professor, Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia
Tens of millions of people are learning Chinese worldwide in diaspora (heritage-language), foreign-language and second-language contexts, a number expected to rise dramatically over the next decade or two. Yet surprisingly little applied linguistic research has examined the learning of Chinese as an additional language (CAL)—the purposes for which people are learning Chinese (Mandarin, in particular), their learning experiences and trajectories, and the (changing) ideologies, identities, transnational migration, and literacies associated with CAL. In this presentation, I discuss research on the teaching, learning, and use of Chinese from social, cultural, and discursive perspectives. I describe recent studies (including my own) examining: (1) changing media discourses related to the teaching and learning of Chinese, (2) issues of learner agency (and exceptionalism), and (3) the negotiation of learners’ identities and literacies in CAL. I conclude by discussing current issues and gaps in the existing research and possible future directions.
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Patricia (Patsy) Duff is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, working in the graduate programs in Teaching English as a Second Language and Modern Language Education primarily. She is also Co-director of the Centre for Research in Chinese Language and Literacy Education. Patsy’s main scholarly interests are related to language socialization across bilingual and multilingual settings; qualitative research methods in applied linguistics (especially case study and ethnography and complementary approaches to classroom research); issues in the teaching, learning, and use of English, Mandarin, and other international languages in transnational contexts; the integration of second-language learners in schools, universities, and society; multilingualism and work; and sociocultural, sociolinguistic, and sociopolitical aspects of language(s) in education. She has published and lectured widely on these topics. Her books and edited volumes include Teaching and Learning English Grammar: Research Findings and Future Directions (2015, co-edited); Learning Chinese: Linguistic, Sociocultural, and Narrative Perspectives (2013, co-authored), Case Study Research in Applied Linguistics (2008), Language Socialization (2008, co-edited, with a revised edition in preparation), Issues in Chinese Language Education and Teacher Development (2008, co-edited); and Inference and Generalizability in Applied Linguistics (2006, co-edited).
November 12: Researcher Reflexivity and Positionality in Ethnographic Fieldwork
Presenter: Bal Krishna Sharma, UHM
In this presentation, I reflect on my ethnographic fieldwork in the context of tourism in Nepal, paying attention to how my presence as an ethnographer influenced the interactional dynamics between tourists, guides and locals in travel destinations. Researchers, who are often external members, may affect the researched community variously because they go with various identities, subjectivities, and socio-political histories. There may be power differences between the researcher and the researched, and this difference may have various effects on the people and events in research sites, and as a result, in the data generated. When it comes to researching workplace contexts, researchers have to be extra careful since their presence may intrude the regular business of the research site. In this presentation, I will first start with my reflections of gaining access to a workplace research site, the participants, and discuss specific challenges in the field. As a major part of my talk, I will analyze how my presence as a third party member had an influence on the interactional participation of the participants and the data collected. The analysis will show that language researchers are not just the third party neutral observers of research sites, events and people, but they can exert a significant influence on them.