Research

My undergraduate career involved many more instances of me volunteering to participate in research projects than actually developing them. My time in the LTS program has afforded me multiple opportunities to review literature, propose studies, and conduct research. The LING 530 Research Methods for Applied Linguists course, and by extension McKinley and Rose (2020) introduced the concept of action research, or research being developed and applied by educators within the classroom through observation and collection of data to improve their own classrooms. This concept appealed greatly to me, as I found it much more interesting to work at the level of an individual classroom rather than to work on a larger scale. This concept had the largest impact on my own artifacts, as I have already and continue to work in specific contexts that I would love to utilize action research to benefit. 

The first article included in this competency is an article critique written in the LT 544 Second Language Acquisition course. The article used was well-written and well-researched; its only pitfall was that the authors were proposing a new communicative language teaching (CLT) model and had only recently begun conducting studies utilizing it. Preliminary results were promising, but they were–as stated before–preliminary, and utilizing a very small sample size when trying to adjust a global model of CLT practices. In short, this was a research article that, at the time of its publication, was facing a potential significance issue with its results. That said, this article was a great model for not overstating or overinflating one’s results past what they could reasonably prove. This article also succeeded in its purpose, which was to draw awareness to a “gap” in the research surrounding this developed CLT model, and open the floor for new studies to be conducted to improve accuracy of results. I for one see this as a fantastic opportunity for action research, and the implementation of a plurilingual CLT model in a future teaching context. 

The research proposal that I created as part of LING 530 was one of my great prides of the LTS program, and I have included it here as my second artifact. This was once again action research, where I proposed a longitudinal study at the school I have volunteered at in the past in order to evaluate whether a change to their time and intensity of explicit reading instruction would cause a significant improvement in student reading scores. This research also would compare native English speaker’s reading score improvement with ESL student reading score improvement as a way to determine if this change to time and intensity would impact one population differently than the other. There was a third experimental group of ESL students whose instruction would also be modified to include explicit L1 literacy instruction as well as target language instruction. Data was to be collected over two years, and intensity and “dosage” would be determined by Warren et. al’s (2007) “cumulative intervention intensity” and Ukrainetz et al.’s (2009) “recommended dosage.” This research utilized these two frameworks for frequency and intensity of instruction which I could never find evidence of being applied in a classroom (though I also found no work refuting them), and certainly not with attention to the difference between native English speakers and ESL learners. Post-collection, data was to be analyzed via multiple linear regressions to determine the significance of the effectiveness of the new explicit instruction schedule, the difference in performance between native speakers and ESL learners, and the difference between strict target language instruction and target language and L1 instruction. 

The last artifact that I have included in the area of research competency is the portion of the methods section of the OIIP program evaluation done in LT 611 that pertained to the student end-of-program questionnaire. This area of the evaluation was the one I was perhaps the most involved in; I provided much of the organization of the questions, as well as some of the development of which questions that students would be asked. When the students responded to the survey and the data came in, I provided quantitative and qualitative analysis, calculating averages of numerical answers and analyzing short answers for common themes that could be grouped together and simplified for our purposes. Like the article I critiqued above, our research had a significance issue, as only eight students responded, but out of that sample size we still pulled many student suggestions that made it into our official recommendations for the future of the course. When the data was collected and analyzed, I was also the person in charge of writing up this portion of the methods section, which means that this is another artifact that I am proud to include, as I had the opportunity to contribute to so many different stages of its development. 

References

McKinley, J. & Rose, H. (2020). The Routledge handbook of research methods in applied linguistics (McKinley J. & Rose, H, Eds.). Routledge.

  Ukrainetz, T. A., Ross, C. L., & Harm, H. M. (2009). An Investigation of Treatment Scheduling for Phonemic Awareness With Kindergartners Who Are at Risk for Reading Difficulties. Language, Speech & Hearing Services in Schools, 40(1), 86–100. https://doi.org/10.1044/0161-1461(2008/07-0077) 

Warren, S.F., Fey, M.E. and Yoder, P.J. (2007), Differential treatment intensity research: A missing link to creating optimally effective communication interventions. Ment. Retard. Dev. Disabil. Res. Rev., 13: 70-77. https://doi-org.libproxy.uoregon.edu/10.1002/mrdd.20139