Research

This particular area of proficiency may have been the most difficult in the LTS program for me personally. The reason was mainly during the LT 530 Research Methods class that I took as an undergrad where we spent time learning a new coding system called R in order to conduct specific research on language acquisition and testing. I knew that this skill was an important one to grasp and understand, but this was my first time conducting the research using this quantitative method as opposed to the more qualitative methods that I was used to doing. It was during the Research Methods course, I began to think in a broad scope about what specific area of second language acquisition that I would like to conduct research on, which eventually evolved into many research papers on this topic in other classes. I have always been interested in vocabulary acquisition and second language learning as an adult and how the results affect methods for effective language teaching and it was during the courses in this area of proficiency that I felt the most focused on delving into that research topic. 

While taking the courses that are in this area of proficiency such as Second Language Acquisition, Research Methods of Applied Linguistics, and the LT 611 Master’s Project course, I was able to delve further into the area of second language acquisition differences between adult language learners and young language learners in order to identify useful methods that would help adult learners acquire a second language more efficiently. In my Article Critique for LING 544 Second Language Acquisition (SLA) I focused on useful methods for adult learners to learn and memorize Japanese kanji (Eduarda, 2015). I chose this specifically not only because that is something that I have found difficult when learning Japanese, but also because many of the findings that I discovered could be applied to learning other languages as well. These findings included transferring information from the working memory to long-term memory, using visual aids to help remember things, and pairing the learning information with body movements to also increase memory. I found this research to be very accurate when applying the findings to my own teaching context of teaching English. I learned that using various methods of teaching a language can greatly improve the results of the target learners.

I also had the chance to improve my skills in collecting and analyzing data during my time in the LT 611 course. I had the great opportunity to team up with my cohort and conduct a program evaluation of the OIIP program, which was the same one that I interned for CASLS and taught the students from Tamagawa University. This gave me the chance to see the program from another point of view and look at it from a very academic standpoint in order to identify areas that could use improvement as well as areas that were very successful. I could see first hand the perspectives of both the international participants of the program, the role that Li-Hsien had in the program, and the viewpoints of program evaluators from the outside looking in. It was here that I was able to connect my knowledge of needs analysis and apply it to the needs of a program as a whole as opposed to an individual student or class (Nation & Macalister, 2010). 

One of my roles in the program evaluation process was the role of conducting a personal interview with Li-Hsien along with two other cohort members Aissa Canteres and Ryan Wozniak. In this portion of the evaluation, I learned to utilize useful techniques when asking interview questions that lowered the chance of any bias to a minimum. This was in order to get the most accurate data out of the interview questions as we could (Davis & McKay, 2018). Before we conducted the interview, we created together a list of questions that aimed to address the main goal and objective of the evaluation which was to measure participant satisfaction with the program and also analyze the preparation of what the program expected out of the participants. Once the questions were created, we held the interview in person and recorded the audio in order to further analyze the answers. I also had the role of coding the results of the interview with my fellow LTS cohort member Yueyan Jin. Here, I learned to organize the results of the interview into salient and informative pieces of data and categorize the data based on areas that were the most pertinent to the overall evaluation. Next, my final role in the program evaluation was to organize and write the final draft of the Methods section of the interview process in order to be placed into the complete program evaluation document. I could see the relevance of all the qualitative data that was collected during the evaluation process and be able to organize the results into an academic report. I was able to see that language teaching is made stronger and more efficient by doing proper research and organized data collection in order to achieve accurate and profound results that improve over time (Davis & McKay, 2018).

Using what I learned in the area of research, I plan to continue data collection on second language acquisition and language teaching with the intention of improving my personal ability for language teaching and allow my learners to get the most out of their experience as possible. I learned that both the teacher and students are learning from each other simultaneously and through conducting research, we are able to more accurately observe and analyze the world around us. The tools that I learned in this area of proficiency have allowed me to include more accurate and versatile methods of acquiring and organizing data into my lesson plans and reflect on the information that is gathered in order to improve my language teaching abilities. 

References

Davis, J. & McKay, T. (2018). A Guide to Useful Evaluation of Language Programs. Georgetown University Press.

Eduarda, M (2015) Studying How to Study Kanji: A Practical Approach. Asian Conference on Language Learning Official Conference

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303895648_Studying_How_To_Study_Kanji_A_Practical_Approach

Nation, I.S.P. & Macalister, J. (2010). Language Curriculum Design. Routledge.