圖四、以圖表講述敘事資料
CC’s Note
Day 4, the agenda changed. We are not discussing the readings anymore. The student project is the focus.
Leo wanted the students to stick to the data, i.e., their narratives, so they were asked to create a poster and tell their own story in class today. Each of the seven narrators showed up with a poster:
Most were hand-drawn with color pens; one was a computer generated graphic, while another was a series of family and personal photos. After each story, Leo opened floor for discussion and questions. Sometimes the questions asked for clarification, sometimes there was a bit
analysis when the audience saw a pattern.
Telling their own stories is something we are very familiar with, but I think pictures helped a lot in the audience's comprehension because of concreteness. They also reveal a lot more emotions which were not clear before. I knew all about this, but this is the first time that the students draw!
I sensed that, perhaps with Leo as the audience, the stories were told a bit differently. In the past the stories were told and discussed in Chinese because at one point we realized the story tellers and listener felt very differently with the two languages. But, this time the stories and
responses sounded just as natural and sincere as in Chinese, perhaps because of Leo, a real audience that they are comfortable with. Also, there seemed to be more mention of native speakers -- perhaps having to do with what Leo said to be interesting. I think this picture telling activity to Leo really added a new dimension to the data that we already had.
It is also interesting that while one person was getting ready to present, all the other people would be busy helping out: some were taking pictures, others were making sure the tools worked and
the environment was ready. I think there is a clear sense of community in this group.
At the end of the class, Leo talked about what to do for the following three days. Students are going to collaboratively construct a timeline for this study for the two semesters: What we did and when. Then, Thursday we will return to theoretical frames. Finally, Friday the students will develop an abstract for AAAL. I can tell students really like what they are experiencing with Leo, and that is very good.
Seminar Day 5: June 2, 2010
第五天
Van Lier 博士要求大家將一年來研究的發展程序以時間軸的方式表現出來，接著分
析脈落並細說研究問題。
圖五之ㄧ、合力重組研究時間軸 圖五之二、分組細說研究問題
CC’s Note
It was raining again last night. The temperature dropped to 20 degrees C. I was wearing two layers of light sweaters. What a surprise for May in Taipei! It actually felt a lot like going to conferences or attending graduate classes overseas. Obviously, Leo brought us the overseas graduate school atmosphere quite thoroughly!
I was busy teaching the whole day. At 4pm, an MA student came to have me sign her off for graduation. I did not have time to sit down with her, so we walked uphill while talking. That worked out well: She got to hand in her papers, while I could go join the seminar team for constructing a timeline.
When I entered the room around 4:30pm, Oliver, Emily, Mandy, Anita, and Athena (all five MA students) had already created half of the timeline on the big white board in front of the room.
They were still trying hard by putting their heads and memories together: What did we do that?
What happened afterwards? I saw colors, lines, texts, and figures being used to indicate who said
or did what that changed the project's path of development. Big labels "Angels" indicates a period of silence at earlier stages, and hesitation in the middle when the team seemed to experience a period of not knowing what to do (Joe later said, "we talked a lot but could not write."). I helped out a few things here and there. Among the six of us, gradually a magnificent timeline started to take shape, stretching across the big white board and dated from the very beginning of 981 semester (September 2010) up to Leo's visit in June 2011 now. A moment later Leo and PhD students arrived too. Joe asked, "when did that (the timeline) happen?" Obviously he was surprised by the beautiful timeline stretching in front of him.
Leo asked the students to provide a bit introduction to the timeline. Oliver led the way, while the others helping out and filling in gaps. I was really happy to hear this because a lot of what they did behind the scene was told, including their struggles and shifting of directions in the middle of analyzing their data in each of the groups. That was the first time I had a chance to know.
After the timeline was presented, Leo led the students to identify four layers of work we are doing:
Layer 4: Publishing -- Meaning | Metalevel |Implications| Usefulness Layer 3: Framing -- Consolidate | Structure | Organize
Layer 2: Timeline -- Finding our way | "puzzle"| Exploring Layer 1: Stories -- N N N N N N N N (i.e., 7 narratives)
We did Layer 1 on Day 3; we do Layer 2 today (Day 4), and we will do Layer 3 tomorrow (Day 5) and Layer 4 on Day 6.
Moving toward Layer 3, Leo had the students write a question that they thought they were addressing or they wanted to know. Then, they talked to one peer to transform two questions into one. A few moments later, each pair of students wrote on the two small white boards what they came up with.
Here are the four questions:
Emily & Mandy:
From our data, we often come up with the conclusion that “Everyone is unique.” But what’s so special about this? And how can those EFL learners resonate with our narratives, which may be quite different from their experiences?
Oliver & Gin:
Understanding and relating who I was through who I am to who I will be in the ecological context we have been through.
Kenneth & Athena:
How could our understanding of ourselves lead others to understand themselves as EFL learners/teachers and how could the process of seeing others understand themselves lead us to understand ourselves?
Anita & Joe:
Why do we want to speak English well and worry if we cannot?
As homework, the students need to 'merge' these 4 questions into one (the ‘structure’). They will also need to write a one-page abstract using these questions.
As the last activity of the evening, the class took a picture in front of the great timeline.
Later, in an email to the class, Leo wrote --
> Thank you, Kenneth, Prof. Chao and everybody,
>
> I have to say, I am very excited to be a part of this project, and i am grateful to you all for allowing me to contribute to it. Awesome!
>
> See you tomorrow,
>
> Leo
---Original message---
From:van Lier, Leo A. <[email protected]>
Date:Wed, 2 Jun 2010 19:01:02 -0400
Subject:Re: Leo's Seminar Day 4: June 2, 2010 Thank you for your thoughts, Chin-chi.
For me, of course i was not part of that long two-semester process, but seeing the time line unfold and the description/comments was very instructive. i think it was also instructive for the
participants since it led them to "reconstruct" the process and come closer to a metacognitive level of understanding. They were thinking through it as they recollected the various steps. At the same time this will help when starting to put it into a more formal genre.
It was interesting to see how at certain points during the research there were periods of apparent lack of progress, with "angels flying," "silence," contrasting conceptions and so on. Just
examining this process itself is very illuminating.
I thought the four statements that were produced are very productive and central to the task ahead.
I look forward to seeing how the abstract / summary pages turn out today.
Leo's Seminar Day 6: June 3, 2010
第六日主題是如何將我們的研究發展成論文並且分析我們研究的優勢。博士生張睿銓、蔡 文雄、張菁菁、碩一謝明宏、英文系助理教授黃怡萍、外文中心副教授黃淑真、外文中心 助理教授許麗媛等七位師生也分別與
van Lier 博士約談，利用白天的時間針對個人之研究
做個別諮商。圖六、van Lier 博士與本案主持人招靜琪老師帶領學生討論中
CC’s Note
Another incredible, amazing evening -- Leo helped us start a paper!
Today students came in with their short summaries (a.k.a. abstracts, research narratives). Three as a group: One read directly from her writing, the other two took notes. Their reported their peer's summary, not their own, while I played the role of a secretary trying as hard as I could to put what I heard on the white board. Leo wrote on his notepad. Later Leo circled things from the white board to reveal cycles of development and emotional shifts that he found in this new run of research narrative: moving from politics and parental pressure at earlier stages, to becoming aware of a critical view on English learning but not being able to do much, to making choices that led to now.
Then we pulled out the paper structure that I had provided to class before Leo came, which has assigned parts for each group of students to develop but students had not been able to do so for many reasons. Using it as a starting point, Leo started to voice an introduction and a structure for our paper while on a different computer Ken typed verbatim --
The purpose of this study is to illuminate practices of English teaching as they are current unfolding in different countries as well as in Taiwan. In recent years, there has been an ever increasing pressure to learn English in many countries like…. In order to address this urgent and pressing issue, a group of graduate students designed a research project the circumstances in
which English study develop in particular settings.
In this study, a group of seven graduate students (say who) took the initiative to document their own learning with the initial purpose of understanding the different forces, challenges, and constraints surrounding the process of learning Eng within a context of the pressures of Eng as (a global lang?)
[insert:
over the period of 2 semesters’ work, the grad students engaged in a number of data gathering and research activities which we will briefly outline in the into
To begin with, all the students wrote a history of their learning, including a number of revisions (less detail ..Keep for method), engaged in mutual discussions, dialogue, cycles of reflection and interpretation, and study of relevant literature. Subsequently, the narratives were used to initiate in-depth analyses and comparative study of a variety of experiences that were encountered. In this paper, we document in detail the processes of investigation, the analysis of the results, and the implications for language teaching and learning in a variety of settings.
Lit Rev
Keep ecology for later
As this project evolved, a number of key issues were identified. These include… (gov’t policies, educational practices, parental pressure, …)
1. _____________
2. _____________
[include only: general… overall non-linear nature of the process; avoid redundancy]
Start with
1. global Englishes, political (Pennycook Canagarajah…) lang policies;
2. socio-cultural theory ; ecology perspectives
3. identity and agency (Halliday did NOT… meaning potential) … autonomy and motivation 4. subsection on narrative research, grounded theory… multiple case studies
Provisional questions:
On the basis of the lit. rev., we formulated our research questions as follows:
Methodology:
THE timeline (cyclical nature with verbatim examples of the narratives)
We started out our investigation by formulating… which we later sharpened/ defined/ … PSEUDONYMS -- use the original Chinese names
3-part
two kinds of direct quotes: how to signpost e.g. in the diagram, we will use the … in 3 levels…
in the 1st level, we shall call NAR (narrative), just tell the story without analysis OVERVIEW:
short half-page summary of (7) – all started …, sequence (elem -> jr. high…) DETAIL:
then go through them using their own voices (topics), In Emily’s case, … salient snippets of history
the 2nd level we shall call RES (research), analyses of time, place, people; crisis points, ‘pie’- mutuality/directionality/reciprocity,
the 3rd REF (reflection) --> do as a discussion section of a paper sum up what it all means (as professionals)
Discussion (= typical academic paper); ‘playing the game without knowing so’; [bring back lit rev];
Implications:
How this can be applied…
this narrative will be useful for…
wish to promote an understanding of…
Reflection: non-representativeness, rationale/ choices made (LvL’s help 6/04: create phrases to connect parts)
Later on, he pointed out the selling point of our paper which should go to the INTRO:
a unique, very innovative way of investigating a particular slice of reality (contextualized
research); through very participatory…; combining narratives and reflections together in order to understand what reality means… relevant to any other settings in which… important implications for… policy and educational practice
In the end we were simply full of appreciation. Speechless!!
Cc’s Thoughts
Looking at what Leo has been doing with the students, I am learning a lot about --
1. Being ready! -- It has indeed been a good experience, but it would not have been this way if the students had not done enough homework. They had read many of Leo's work and had done a study that allowed them to get Leo's attention and engage in meaningful interaction with Leo. My understanding of Leo's style in the PSU classroom also helped me as their professor to see how to get them ready. But, funny that I forgot to prepare myself and my own work! What would have happened if the VGC group could spend some time with him during this visit? And my own work too. What would have happened if I could show Leo my work as my students did? I guess we had our opportunities in PSU. The problem is at that time we had not read enough and did not know enough about Leo. Next time when there is a chance like this I must remember to get myself ready.
2. Being a professor -- Leo's way of interacting with students and the activities that he conducted in the classroom are all very instructive for me. On the one hand, students are comfortable with him, willing to follow along and wait to see how things unfold. Leo makes me feel that there is a lot I need to learn in order to become a good professor. On the other hand, I am learning a lot about teaching just by watching the class on the side. I had my college freshmen class fill out a big timeline for the activities that we had done for the whole school year on the blackboard yesterday. When the timeline started to take shape in front of everybody, you could really see sparks on the kids' eyes -- Everyone was surprised by the amount of interesting things that we had done in class!! This is a good activity for reflection at the end of the semester. I also had Emily demonstrate how to do language learning narratives with my college freshmen classes. With a self-created graphic in front of them, these 18-year-olds could tell their stories in English just as well as my graduate students. Another opportunity to collect data from them! It was always a pain to interview college freshmen about their language learning experiences. Now, I finally have a productive way!!
Leo’s Response --
Thank you once again for your thoughts and reactions. I am glad we saw further progress and directions. Very often it is really hard to start a paper, and we spend a lot of time staring at a blank screen. Once we get started things may flow more easily, even though further blocks may come down the road.
I will finish going through your earlier document and make some notes for tonight. Let's hope the momentum will be great!!
See you later. I'll be working in my room till I hear from you.
Leo
On Jun 3, 2010, at 6:00 AM, van Lier, Leo A. wrote:
Hi all,
Thank you for another intense evening of thought and action. I will go through the earlier draft (I must remember from now on to ALWAYS scroll down!!) this evening and tomorrow morning, and hopefully make some notes that I can share.
Gin asked me about information regarding news and conferences in global languages etc., and i thought of the Educational Linguistics list that i am a member of. Since perhaps several of you would like to sign up for that, i include the information that my colleague Francis Hult, who runs the list, sent me:
>>>>
Tell them to go here and scroll down to the section on subscribing:
https://lists.sis.utsa.edu/mailman/listinfo/edling
There are fields where they can enter name and e-mail address. Then they should click the subscribe button.
<<<<<
I find it a useful list to be informed of news, conferences and publications about global language issues all over the world. I do recommend it.
Good night, and please do get some sleep, even if only for a couple of hours.
See you tomorrow, Leo
Leo's Seminar Day 7: June 4, 2010
最後一天學生開始分組寫作，van Lier 博士則慷慨提供相關文獻資訊。
圖七、學生圍繞在 van Lier 博士身旁尋找文獻
The last day was basically a work session. Students first brought in night market dishes for Leo to try. We were just eating and chatting along and did not actually get started until after 6pm.
Then, student groups were assigned to different sections of the literature review:
Global Englishes, policies, Asia context -- Joe & Oliver Taiwan -- Anita & Athena
SCT, Ecology -- Kent & Emily Narrative inquiry -- Gin & Oliver
Each of the groups then took turns huddling around Leo and his computer to get articles and suggested references. Gradually, all class members came sitting close around Leo in order not to
miss out on important information. We also made sure that we understand how Leo thinks each section of the article should be developed, with the understanding that when the writing actually starts adjustments will be necessary.
When it was close to 8pm, students presented gifts to Leo, in appreciation of his kind help and instruction over the past one week, including some specially designed T shirts, a banana flash disk, a story book on our university, a university bag, etc. They also wanted Leo to sign their ecology books: One by one Leo patiently signed their books and took photos with the students.
Even the camera girl Terri, an undergraduate freshman, got a photo.
After photos and everything, three students, me and Leo went take a walk at the Shi-Ling night market, just to experience the atmosphere, until way over 10pm. Earlier today we also went to Dintaifung for dumplings http://www.dintaifung.com.tw/en/index.asp
The Confucius temple, Taipei