August 24
Starting off on the Right Foot: Advising Session for New MA Students
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 specializations, 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 to students and other forms of support
August 31
Faculty Showcase Talks: Learn what your professors and colleagues are doing (Part I)
Presenter 1: Richard R. Day, Professor in Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa
Presenter 2: JD Brown, Professor in Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa
September 7
Taking cross-linguistic differences seriously in infant speech perception: Acquisition of the Japanese sound system
Presenter: Reiko Mazuka (RIKEN Brain Science Institute), Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Duke University
The goal of our research is to identify processes by which infants with no prior linguistic knowledge and limited cognitive skills acquire the ability to understand and manipulate highly complex language systems in a short time and without explicit instruction. To date, the majority of studies have been done with English and a few additional European languages, with little attention paid to whether relevant features are language-specific or apply broadly across typologically different languages.
The talk will present results from studies with Japanese infants (and those comparing Japanese with other languages), on the acquisition of segmental contrasts, emergence of phonological grammar, as well as the role of infant-directed speech in language acquisition, which challenges or complements previous findings. The talk will discuss results from various studies from our lab highlighting the unique opportunities that Japanese language properties provide to disentangle fundamental questions pertaining to acquisition.
September 14
Faculty Showcase Talks: Learn what your professors and colleagues are doing (Part II)
Presenter 1: Nicole Ziegler, Assistant Professor in Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa
Presenter 2: Christina Higgins, Professor & Graduate Chair, Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa
September 21
Faculty Showcase Talks: Learn what your professors and colleagues are doing (Part III)
Presenter 1: Graham Crookes, Professor & Department Chair, Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa
Presenter 2: Geoffrey LaFlair, Assistant Professor in Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa
Sept 28
What Do Language Program Administrators Really Do?
An Uncensored Look at Language Program Administration
Presenters: Kenton Harsch, Director, & Priscilla Faucette, Associate Director (English Language Institute, SLS, UH-Mānoa);
Joel Weaver, Director, & Christine Guro, Assistant Director (Hawai’i English Language Program, SLS, UH-Mānoa)
Presenters will discuss the administration of two intergral programs within the Second Language Studies Department, the English Language Institute (ELI), and the Hawai’I English Language Program (HELP), as well as their experience managing language programs in a wide range of contexts: ESL, EFL, higher education and private industry. Come and find out more about the roles in language program administration: the challenges, benefits and how to succeed in this career path. The talk will be followed by a Q&A period.
October 5
Time and Stress Management for Students
Presenter: Hannah Im, Counseling and Student Development Center, UH-Mānoa
With life’s ongoing demands, pressures and stressors, maintaining our mental and emotional health becomes an increasing priority. This workshop will focus on learning how to manage our stress, and move toward the practice of self-care and wellness. We will finish with discussion on managing research and writing projects.
October 12
Faculty Showcase Talks: Learn what your professors and colleagues are doing (Part IV)
Presenter: Robert Bley-Vroman, Professor in Second Language Studies, UH-Mānoa
Are tone-language speakers better at music? Are musicians better at tone languages? The state of the research
October 19
ELI & HELP Teachers’ Action Research
Presenters: Betsy Gilliland, Assistant Professor, SLS; Carrie Bach, Kelly Bolen, Anna Mendoza, & Lin Zhou, SLS Graduate Students; UH-Mānoa
In Spring 2017, ELI writing teachers (and one HELP reading teacher) designed action research studies to investigate their students’ learning and their curricular practices. In this brown bag session, Dr. Betsy Gilliland will explain how she facilitated the teachers’ research and then the teachers will individually describe their studies and reflect on successes and challenges of doing teacher research while also being a full time SLS graduate student.
October 26
Visiting Colleague Research Presentations, Two Talks
Presenter 1: Junko Matsuzaki Carreira, Tokyo Keizai University, Japan
Motivational Model of English Learning Among Elementary School Students in Japan
This presentation will show a motivational model of English learning, based on self-determination theory (SDT), and explore how developmental differences would appear in the motivational model. Results support the notion that perceived teachers’ autonomy support positively predicts intrinsic motivation through students’ perceptions of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Regarding age differences, the path from students’ perceptions of competence to intrinsic motivation showed higher coefficients for students of higher grades than for students of middle grades; the path from perceived teachers’ autonomy support to intrinsic motivation showed higher coefficients for students of middle grades than for students of higher grades.
Presenter 2: Nattharmma Thong-Iam, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
EFL Students’ Use of their First Language (L1) in Performing Formative Assessment Activities
Students’ use of their first language in the classroom has long been a controversial issue in second/foreign language education. This study argues for the re-examination of the questionable compartmentalization of the first and target languages when planning, designing and administering English speaking tasks for formative language assessment. Situated in a pragmatism paradigm, the study aims at examining the use of L1 (Thai) by a class of 24 undergraduate students enrolled in a listening and speaking course in a university in Thailand. These students were required to complete “a street-survey project,” a six-phase culminating task geared towards assessing their English speaking performance. A set of questionnaires, stimulated recall interviews, and classroom observations were employed to elicit the extent to which the students used their L1 while they were performing the task in each phase. It was found that in negotiating the demands of task completion, the students used L1 for various reasons, with varying degrees of preference. Their deliberate use of L1 was also affected by their language proficiency and self-efficacy, as well as their socio-academic interactions with their peers and the course teacher. The findings of this study, augmented by those from other relevant studies, can therefore contribute to the potential establishment of a pedagogically principled approach to L1 and L2 use in performing formative assessment.
November 2
Ecologically Designed English Writing Course in China
Presenter: Lin Zhou, SLS PhD Student, UH-Mānoa
This is a design-based research project with an ecological, dialogical and distributed (EDD) (Linell, 2009; Newgarden & Zheng, 2016; van Lier, 2004; Thibault, 2011) theories-driven design of learning environment enriched by an online pedagogical drama game–Finding Jolin’s Way Home. The purpose of this research aims to uncover the relationships between the activity theory (Engestrom, 2000), the EDD framework, Internet pedagogical drama game-supported second language writing (English) curriculum, and the implementation of a seven-day curriculum. The curriculum was built on a flipped classroom setting in which participants (second-year high-school students in China) read teacher-chosen articles about a particular topic, such as technology and environment, before three-hour face-to-face sessions consisting of group discussion, a game session, and a timed-writing session. The first round of designing and implementation was completed in July 2017, and a parallel comparison between the computer pedagogical drama-game engendered group discussions and group discussions guided by discussion questions showed that the pedagogical computer drama-game engendered group interactions that demonstrated students’ languaging behavior (Thibault, 2011) in ways not found in group discussions. This presentation will showcase the first round of design-implementation of this design-based research and demonstrate how the pedagogical drama-game engendered group discussions are different from group discussions guided by discussion questions.
November 16
Teach in Thailand: Informational Meeting About the Summer 2018 Practicum
Presenters: Betsy Gilliland, Associate Professor, and SLS Graduate Students; 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 2018 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 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 2018 practicum but can’t make it to this session, please email Dr. Gilliland to let her know.
December 7
Transnationalism, Identity, and L2 Socialization
Presenter: Patricia A. Duff, Professor, University of British Columbia
With the growing emphasis in applied linguistics on transnationalism, multilingualism, and migration, and a concomitant increase in attention to identities and ideologies in language learning/use (see, e.g., ARAL, 2015), L2 socialization research has expanded into a variety of heritage/diaspora, postcolonial, study-abroad, virtual, and other settings (Duff & May, 2017). In this presentation, I discuss current trends, sensibilities, opportunities, and challenges in this new research and provide examples from ethnolinguistic contexts not traditionally associated with L2 socialization work.
Patricia (Patsy) Duff is Professor of Language and Literacy Education and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia, working in the graduate and post-degree certificate 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, as an applied linguist, 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.