As I consider myself a life-long learner, one of the most important overarching lessons I learned in the LTS program is that a language teacher must also be a researcher. This involves finding out who our learners are and staying informed about language-teaching methodologies. 

In our Second Language Acquisition course (LING 544), we learned the mastery of article critique. While reading an article related to our interests, we paid attention to the structure and presentation of the article, the content, and key points about implementation in the classroom. My artifact is titled "Article Critique from SLA (LING 544). As a tutor of young Russian heritage learners, I chose an article by Polinsky and Scontras (2019) titled “Understanding heritage languages.” The authors developed a model that predicts ways in which heritage languages will and will not depart from their baselines, or which aspects of grammar will be robust and those that will break. They hoped to demonstrate that the study of heritage languages could be as informative to the understanding of grammar as the study of monolinguals. They came to the conclusion that heritage speakers optimize their grammar by simplifying difficult or more advanced language concepts. They also proposed that the baseline for heritage speakers should be the input that these speakers receive and not the monolingual “idealization.” In my opinion, it is important for language teachers to understand this so that they acknowledge the language of heritage speakers in the classroom as valuable and valid. Teachers should never put down the way heritage learners speak or contrast their speech as being “incorrect”. 

I have started to implement these ideas in my own teaching. Most recently, I brought to attention a word my young student was stumbling against while reading and gently asked him to think about why that might be the case. After thinking, he realized that the reason he puts stress on one syllable while the textbook shows it on another is because at home, he hears the word pronounced differently than the textbook indicates. I congratulated him on figuring it out and informed +him that in most places where Russian is spoken as a first language, the word is pronounced the way it is written in the textbook. However, it is perfectly valid that he and his relatives say it differently at home. Finally, I told him that he can choose which way he pronounces it, depending on who he wants to sound like.

The LTS program further trained us on how to understand and perform research in our Research Methods course (LING 530). We learned about different approaches to research, such as quantitative (focused on making generalizations using statistics) and qualitative (focused on descriptions of experiences). We studied in depth how to read and write up the statistical findings. Even though many of the concepts were very technical and difficult to understand, especially without prior statistical training, I am thankful we were offered this course. As I mentioned in the beginning of this reflection, teachers must keep current their knowledge of language teaching methodology, which can be done through reading articles. With the training I received, I can now understand the findings in articles much more easily. 

We also learned how to design a research study, starting from finding “gaps” in research and ending with writing up a report. Even if language teachers do not plan on doing formal research, it is important to know how to perform smaller types of action research when we are learning about who our students are.

My artifact from LING 530 is a continuation of my interests in heritage language instruction. For my “Research Proposal” assignment, I reviewed literature on the way Russian HS in the U.S. use case inflections. Russian has a rich case system, which makes it difficult to learn for English-speaking students. Researchers are interested in finding out how difficult the case system is for HS by examining the changes they make to the system. Previous studies produced conflicting results about details of this change. My proposal aimed to fill a gap in research as to what extent this language change is happening. After introducing the proposal, I included a literature review. Then I stated my research area and discussed methods. Lastly, I considered possible implications. As this was a proposal, I did not perform the research, but that is something I would be interested in doing.

As part of finding out who our learners are and ways of serving them better, we studied how to evaluate existing language programs in the “Master’s Project” course (LT 611). We practiced action research by evaluating the Oregon International Internship Program (OIIP), which is part of CASLS at University of Oregon. One of the goals of the evaluation was to find out how well the international students in the program are prepared for their internships in local schools.