Panel 1: Tales from classrooms and schools
Abstraction in Second Language Academic Writing: Research and Practice Presenter: Alfredo A. Ferreira, PhD candidate
Abstraction is a key linguistic means of generating disciplinary knowledge. In this talk, I report on research into second-language writers’ use of abstraction across drafts of writing assignments in English, and present classroom writing tasks designed to expand students’ capacities for varying abstraction in context-senstive ways.
Digital Storytelling Software: A Multimodal Reading Experience for Young Learners Presenter: Rodrigo Toloza, MEd student
In this presentation, I discuss how to combine Powerpoint with VoiceThread, an online app, to make a customized picture book with sound recordings and interactive components. I present my reflection on the affordances and limitations of such digital technology when teaching young children to read.
Zoom in, Zoom Out: Focusing Standardized Tests through a Genre and Stylistics Lens Presenter: Gary Saville, MEd student
The Canadian school system is experiencing a rapid influx of L2 English students who arrive late in their secondary education. These students need to adapt quickly to the regiments and idiosyncrasies of written academic English. In this presentation, I will explore how a blend of genre and literary stylistics research have informed my practice as an English and ESL teacher in an after-hours school.
Panel 2: A visit from BREB: Negotiating Research Ethics Principles and Procedures
Obtaining approval from UBC’s Behavioural Research Ethics Board (BREB) is an essential and often complex first step in much of the language and literacy education research we do at this university. While all Canadian universities that receive federal research funding are required to follow the Tri-Council Policy Statement guidelines, there is some variation in how individual applications are assessed. In addition, ethical issues are never simple and involve thorough consideration from many angles. Thus, graduate students who are newcomers to the process at UBC can find it overwhelming and even discouraging.
This panel brings together diverse perspectives on the BREB process: preparing the application, navigating reviewer feedback/requests, and conducting ethical research after approval. Panelists include representatives from BREB (Jean Ruiz) and LLED (Dr. Steven Talmy, Dr. Patricia Duff, Espen Stranger-Johannessen). It is hoped that the perspectives and suggestions offered will generate discussion that will be useful to graduate students of language and literacy education as they move forward in their programs.
Panel 3: Sites of construction: Four living tales of methodology
Discussant: Dr. Meike Wernicke, UBC
Presenters in this mini-colloquium raise questions about how constructionist orientations to methods and data intersect with the lived production of research narratives. As a means for raising such questions, each describes a situated methodological concern for which this orientation has been provocative in/for their experience as dissertators. Specifically, presenters focus on four themes: participant listener, transcription/translation, case study, and research participation/analysis.
Tale 1 (Won Kim) I chronicle a shift in the researcher’s positioning from participant observer to participant listener. This repositioning enabled the researcher to transform putative limitations into a fully engaged listening to the research site. I provide a reflexive/reflective account of how listening mediated the generation, interpretation, and representation of multimodal ethnographic data and how the account of what was heard (and felt) in lieu of what was seen could be construed as a legitimate way of developing ethnographic understanding.
Tale 2 (Bong-gi Sohn) Researchers who are working across languages have to both transcribe the original data and then translate them into another language. This requires multiple entextualization, a process that extracts discourse from its interactional setting and transforming into recordable text. While destabilizing my on-going epistemological views, I discuss the experiences of entextualization of interview data where Korean as a second language speakers and myself are transcribed and translated into English.
Tale 3 (Ryan Deschambault) Working from the premise that “case study is more than just the description of a person or linguistic site” (Duff, 2014, p. 4), I describe how a constructionist orientation urged me to articulate case boundaries in a way that permits investigation of a single case across multiple participants, sites, and data sources.
Tale 4 (Rae-Ping Lin) From social interactionist perspective (De Fina, 2014), researcher’s participation is highly relevant in participant’s identity orientation generated in the process of storytelling. In this presentation, the researcher’s relevance in analyzing participants’ identity construction in relation to social ideology or master narratives (Bamberg, 2004) is discussed. The presenter will rise up issue of how to warrant researcher’s analysis on identity related issues in which her own ideologies are highly involved in the process.