Research

During my undergraduate studies, I had the opportunity to write a research proposal for my PSY 433 (Learning and Memory) class titled “The Roles of Procedural and Declarative Memory in Second Language Acquisition.” Intrigued by the relationship between the two memory systems, and the roles of declarative and procedural knowledge with regard to language production and comprehension (DeKeyser, 2015), my literature review extensively discusses the variety of studies conducted within the field that examine the role of memory in implicit and explicit teaching conditions. In my literature review, I also highlight the theoretical frameworks that acknowledge the role of memory in second language acquisition (Ullman, 2004; Paradis, 2009; DeyKeyser, 2015), as they aided me in constructing a replicated methodology for the proposed study. Upon establishing that there is a lack of studies that examine the roles of memory in children’s second language development, I utilized an experimental design (Rogers & Revesz, 2019) to place adult and child participants into three different learning conditions. I aimed to investigate the influence of the independent variable on and the variations brought upon the dependent variable (Lowen & Plonsky, 2016), where for instance I hypothesized that young learners who engaged in the implicit condition would demonstrate significant syntax and lexical retention. Through this research proposal, I demonstrate my ability to account for internal validity by effectively manipulating the independent variables to minimize extraneous factors that would pose a threat to the results of the study (McKinley & Rose, 2020), through selectively recruiting participants who had minimal second language learning experience, and by utilizing an artificial language Brocanto2 (Brill-Schuetz & Morgan Short, 2014). With consideration that this was my first attempt at a research proposal, I reflect on it with personal growth: I would adapt the procedure to include participants from contexts of second language learning, thus subsequently accounting for external validity (McCleary et al., 2017)

My second research proposal designed in LING 530 highlights my growth and knowledge in the research methods of applied linguistics. Utilizing a qualitative approach (Friedman, 2011), this proposal addresses an area of study that I have been long passionate about: the incorporation of digital games to teach and learn pragmatics. I selected the context of my research to be held in China and Japan after finding out that the opportunities for learners to explore pragmatics are quite limited in English teaching classrooms (Ishihara, 2011; Yuan et al., 2015). By thoroughly examining past studies done within the field, I was able to outline evidence that the attainment of pragmatic competence transcends beyond the dichotomy of explicit and implicit instruction (Soler, 2007; Taguchi, 2015), and thus aimed to further investigate the role of feedback in pragmatic acquisition. I also addressed the multiple affordances that digital games hold with regard to teaching pragmatics, as to where learners are able to engage with the language in a contextualized manner and navigate interactively through social functions (Taguchi, 2024). Through implementing three digital game space interventions (Taguchi, 2020), I constructed a quasi-experimental pretest-protest design (Cook & Wong, 2008) where learners’ pragmatic development was assessed prior to and after the interventions. Furthermore, I proposed the utilization of qualitative content analysis methods (McKinley & Rose, 2020) by coding participants’ journal entries and discourse as they engage with digital games. Through conducting this data analysis I highlight that the findings of this proposed study would allow language educators to gain a better understanding of not only the effective techniques of teaching pragmatics but also examine students’ attitudes towards game-enhanced and game-based learning.  

The LTS program provided us with the opportunity to conduct a small-scale research project in LT 611 (LTS Master’s Project), which allowed me to address a lingering question I had during my time as an early childhood educator: How can we best support dual-language learners? Through this research project, I gained experience with action research (Burns, 2009), where I investigated my desired teaching context and delved into a puzzling yet crucial aspect in the teaching of young learners who might come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. This project has truly made me aware of the rigorous and rewarding aspects of action research, where it involves a cyclical process of exploring, collecting data, reflecting, hypothesizing, and reporting information (Burns, 1999). Through conducting this project, not only was I able to gain experience in designing and adapting survey instruments (Brown, 2001) that examined early childhood educators' beliefs, confidence, and practices in supporting dual-language learners, but I was also able to apply my previous foundations in descriptive (Baffoe-Djan & Smith, 2019) and inferential (Pfenninger & Neuser, 2019) statistics by analyzing the relationships between the three variables of interest. Through this pilot study, I was able to highlight the importance of examining the role of early childhood educators in dual-language learners’ linguistic development. Furthermore, by hypothesizing possible interpretations of the collected data with connections to past research, I outline the crucial implications of language ideologies and their potential effects on the practices of educators when engaging with dual-language learners.