Weekly Reflection in Week 13

Tuesday, November 13^th

Announcement:

Thursday(November 15th): Peer-review of the interim draft
→ 1. send 1 to Dr. Ortega by way of email
→ 2. bring 1 copy to the class to work with your partner


Since we do not have reading assignments this week (due to concentration on writing the drafts), Dr. Ortega brought two activities on writing a research paper.

Activities on Writing a Research Paper:

1. Moving from analysis to interpretation
Analysis
↓
1) Results (= closer to the data, lower inference)

2) Findings (= a bit further away from the data, higher inference)

3) Interpretations

4) Implications(= so what, what else, big leap)

↑
Interpretation

☼ As moving from 1) ~ 4), it goes further from the data. The writer cannot jump but take each phase precisely to write a reader-friendly, good writing.

For a hands-on activity, we looked into 5 examples and underlined the parts to distinguish three degrees of separation from the data.
(1= close 2= further away 3= the furthest away from the data)

1) From Buckwalter, P. (2001). Repair sequencesin SpanishL2dyadic discourse: A descriptive study. The Modern Language Journal, 85, 380-397.

1 & 2: starts very close from the data with low inference and moving on to high inference
(no direct connection with the data, cannot be guessed too much)

☼ The word "interesting" sounds subjective, but the sentence only talks about a piece of data.

2) From Kitano, K. (2001). Anxiety in the college Japanese language classroom. The ModernLanguage Journal, 85, 549-566.

2&3: nicely stated as "found...", "finding..."
: Once variables are leveled (e.g. instructional level, the experience of ...), it goes a little bit beyond the data ( results → findings): implications for teachers

3) From Tse, L. (2000). Student perceptions of foreign language study: A qualitative analysis of foreign language autobiographies. The Modern Language Journal, 84, 69-84.

1 & 2 & 3: as can be seen from the title, this is a qualitative study. The same as quantitative study, the paper organizes the data to show evidence as a starting point (close from the data), and then goes further from the data to interpretations.

☼Although when a study is a qualitative one (and the results may sound interpretation), a researcher should not stop on the 1st (result) or 2nd phase (finding). The 3rd phase(interpretation) is necessary.

4) From McGinnis, S. (1997). Tonal spelling versus diacritics for teaching pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese. The Modern Language Journal, 81, 228-236.

1 & 2 : This example includes both results and findings.

☼When there are any tables/figures ( even in appendix section), it should always be mentioned in the text (e.g. Table 1 shows...)

5) From Thompson, I. (1996). Assessing foreign language skills: Data from Russian. The Modern Language Journal, 80, 47-65.

1 & 2 & 3: In the middle part ("Comparing these results with those of Magnan's 1986 for French"...), the researcher compares his/her results with those of other study. In a discussion section, such a comparison is possible as an interpretation, although it is quite far from the data.


2. Avoiding the "laundry-list effect" when presenting previous research ( it's not a list review, but a lit review ☺!)


Dr. Ortega brought a nice model of a literature review from Spada & Lightbown (1999).

1) We first paid attention to some generic languages used for literature review.

e.g. Previous research has shown that..., so and so has suggested that...,

☼ Out of 15 paragraphs, only 2 paragraphs start precisely with these kinds of generic phrases. There are many ways to start a new paragraphs in lit. review. We can learn them through reading many literatures and find good models.

2) The main part of activity 2 was to examine the parts where we find the researchers' opinions. We can find such sentences in paragraph 2, 10, 13, and 15.

The researchers start their review of lit. from overview of the research topic, move on to more recent studies as their review goes on ( showing their interpretations little by little). They explicitly begin to narrow down the topic to their study from paragraph 10, writing about different studies on the similar topics to theirs. In the last part of paragraph 13, they state their position mentioning about the shortcomings of the previous studies. Then, in final paragraph, they summarize their lit. review and clearly proposes their thesis statement of their study, advocating that they would like to fill the gap between previous studies.

My Reflection

It was nice to have a step by step instruction on writing a research paper. Although students in graduate level are encouraged to learn how to write a research paper through reading many previous literatures, it is very helpful to learn it with some hands-on activities like the ones we had today. I wish there was some graduate level academic writing course. Thanks to some professors ( including Dr. Ortega ), HATESL started to offer some writing workshops, but it would be nice, if we formally had a course focusing on our own writing (not only how to teach L2 writing). I suppose that we feel more comfortable making progresses towards the end of the semester. We can use the knowledge we've gained in the writings in different courses. Last of all, I woudl like to recommend a report (with good suggestions from our professors) of the HATESL Writing Workshop which was sent to us by way of email attachment.

Could you share your good strategies to write a research paper with your classmates?

Thursday, November 15^th

We had a peer-review session with the same partners as the first peer-review for the research proposal. Since all of our papers have progressed further at this phase since last draft (research proposal), Dr. Ortega advised us to pay special attention on the contents. Also, we were advised not to do oral briefing in order to provide feedback from objective point of view. Another advice from Dr. Ortega was to give feedback on organizational issues such as heading and the components in each section (e.g. divide into different section). We all had good opportunities to have objective input from the partners.

Announcement:

1. Reading assignment for next week: November 20^th ( Thursday is a holiday)
   Two readings will be sent electronically. We are expected to read at least one of them.

Dr. Ortega have sent them soon to us after the class meeting. Following is part of email message from her.

Please read at least one of them. Here is my suggestion for who should
prioritize which:

Elizabeth Ellis' (2006) discussion of three conceptualizations of
monolingualism:
Anne
Samantha
Merica
Nick
Miyung
Shay
Emiko

Barbara Seidlhofer's (2001) discussion of English as a lingua franca:
Megumi
Masaki
Ky
Ben
Jung-Min
Hatsumi
Rayoung
Sean

Hope you enjoy these two readings!
Lourdes

2. Tentative Schedule regarding student presentations on their papers

November 29^th, Thursday

Masaki, Miyung, Jung-Min

December 4^th, Tuesday

Ky, Ben, Megumi

December 6^th, Thursday

The rest of the students

The purpose: to get feedback to finalize our papers

Assigned time: Max in 15 minutes & 5 minutes for feedback

If some of us have difficulties to do presentation, it is negotiable with Dr. Ortega. Also, the schedule is not fixed yet. Therefore, it is advised to contact Dr. Ortega if we have any problems.