Abstracts
Abstracts are listed in order of the presentation schedule.
12:30-1:00
Learner Codeswitching in Mandarin as a Foreign Language
Jasmine Hsu (Hum 127)
Whether the first language (L1) should be used in the language classroom has always been a controversial issue. Advocates of the communicative approach claim that learning to communicate through interaction in the second language (L2) allows learners to develop their own L2 system. However, proponents of L1 use in L2 classrooms argue that excluding L1 as a tool is impractical and inhibits language learning. Aiming to understand the functions of learner codeswitching from the L2 to the L1, this study primarily takes the approach of conversation analysis to local interpretations of language alternation in a Mandarin tutoring setting. Additionally, ethnographic data are also considered to gain insights into the meaning of codeswitching from the participants’ perspectives. Four cognitive and social functions of codeswitching were found: 1) establishing intersubjective understanding; 2) learning L2 form and meaning; 3) regulating one’s own mental activity; 4) negotiating identities and relationships. From the perspective of sociocultural theory, learning is a socially-mediated process. Therefore, learners do not merely fall back on L1s when they encounter difficulties in their L2s; they also use L1 as a semiotic tool for intra- and inter-mediation. In acknowledging the benefits of codeswitching in language learning, I will discuss strategies to manage code choices and realize the language classroom as a bilingual or multilingual community of practice.
Music Speaks, We Listen: Using Music in the Adult ESL Classroom
Nora Mitchell (Hum 386)
How do teachers create an atmosphere conducive to learning in the adult ELL listening/speaking classroom? How can we reduce students' anxiety and stifling perfectionism? How can we make the process easier? In everyday life, we listen to and speak English far more than we read and write it. However, many students have an imbalance of skills due to the focus of their EFL studies prior to coming to the United States. In EFL settings it is common for students to be stronger at reading, writing and grammar than they are at speaking, listening and pronunciation. ESL students need instruction that prepares them for real-world encounters. They need to be exposed to colloquial English via authentic materials in order to understand and converse with native English speakers outside of school.
Using popular songs to supplement English language instruction in the adult speaking/listening course is effective and achieves multi-faceted goals: lowering the affective filter, increasing motivation, accessing areas of the brain conducive to learning, building cultural understanding, and providing authentic material to support listening/speaking instruction. And, in particular, it is effective in extending pronunciation curriculum. In order to achieve these goals and take advantage of all that music has to offer in the adult ELL classroom, teachers need to be able to easily and quickly produce music-based materials. This presentation reviews current research on the topic and delivers examples of carefully selected songs with lyrics and accompanying exercises to build students' listening comprehension, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation skills.
Identity and Second Language Acquisition: An Autoethnography
Stephanie Lam (Hum 485)
Focusing on the role of identity in SLA and the function that autoethnography can play in its exploration, I would like to present my work in parallel to my life experiences as an L2-L6 learner. Beginning with a discussion of my own complex identity as it relates to SLA, I will briefly examine identity in SLA by exploring the works of prominent scholars in our field, such as Norton and Duff, and present their findings in a manner that illustrates how I was inspired to forge a path for my own self-discovery. I will then discuss my journey which began while growing up in a multicultural and multilingual household in the Bay Area; to an undergrad student who had the opportunity to travel to Taiwan and Portugal while getting her first taste of TESOL; and finally as an MA TESOL student making sense of her life experiences, coming to terms with her own identity, and exploring the implications for identity in the field of TESOL. I advocate for the use of ethnographic content in the L2 classroom as a way to lower affective factors, encourage cross-cultural understanding and awareness, and validate learners' diverse identities. The paper then discusses how the process of writing my own autoethnography has helped me better understand and accept my own identity, as well as become a more confident language learner, ultimately redefining language learning 'success' in my own terms. Lastly, I present ideas for how this could translate into practical application for the L2 classroom.
1:15-1:45
Flying Purple People Eater: Pragmatic Determinants in Binomial and Adjectival Word Order
Ricardo Romero Sanchez & Alexander Lenarsky (Hum 127)
While the highly-intuitive, default ordering of prenominal adjectives (e.g. big yellow American taxi) has long enjoyed the spotlight in linguistic and psychological research, little attention has been given to inverted or “marked” adjectival placement (e.g. yellow American big taxi). Rather than dismissing the inverted order as a linguistic aberration, which flouts semantic determinants of inherentness, subjectivity and definiteness, we posit that contextual pragmatics and the subjective distance principle motivate marked adjectival ordering.
Utilizing Idea Mapping to Enhance Teacher Education and Practice
Sarah Parsons (Hum 386)
This presentation will discuss a need for on-going teacher education, the practice of idea mapping, theories behind sound educational practice, cognition, and idea mapping, how to hold a professional workshop to teach idea mapping to educators, and how idea mapping can assist with expanding cognitive ability and teacher professional development and practice. Idea mapping is a visual and interactive process, and according to Gardner (2011) and Vygotsky (1980) - people learn well through visual representations, social interaction, and being taught with integrated and diverse teaching methods. Idea mapping seeks to expand upon one's cognitive and problem solving abilities through learning others' visible representations of thought, in a world that is rapidly advancing toward visual modes of learning and communication (Nast, 2006). The presenter will use a powerpoint presentation, visuals, realia, handouts, audience interaction, personal stories, empirically informed research and examples, theoretical studies, and an array of newly developed materials to teach and present about idea mapping and how it can enhance cognitive ability and educational practice. This presentation will seek to: elicit interest in idea mapping, inform the audience about the practice of idea mapping, and hopefully inspire interested parties in utilizing this practice. At the end of this presentation, audience members will be able to: understand how idea mapping works, how they can implement it into their own educational practice, create their own idea maps, as well conduct professional idea mapping workshops if they feel inspired to do so.
Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence within a Composition for Multilingual Students Classroom
Matthew Muñoz (Hum 485)
In recent years, educators and researchers in the field of English Language acquisition have emphasized the need of discussing cultural information relevant to language learning with their L2 English students. However, this task can be an especially challenging for instructors of international students since these students may lack knowledge about the target culture that then hinders their development as English writers. Researchers have also argued that language learning is a form of “enculturation” where a one very often develops a worldview in conjunction with their language skills. Since new worldview is especially difficult to cultivate within the homogeneous cultures of EFL settings. Furthermore, the inseparability of language and culture can make any sort of language learning exercise also a form of cultural exposure regardless of the subject.
This project examines how reflective journal writing may help students in developing their own intercultural communicative competence within a composition for multilingual students classroom at San Francisco State University. The reflective journals aim to give students an opportunity to share and further meditate on various cultural aspects of the target English language. The journals will not only help develop students’ English writing skills but also highlight the cultural knowledge that they already possess as well as what they have accrued over the course of the semester. By asking students to respond to specific questions regarding the cultural information relevant to the various topics covered in class, the project hopes to showcase how reflective free-writing may help students develop intercultural knowledge essential to language learning.
2:00-2:30
Fostering Phonemic Awareness in the ESL Classroom through Linguistics
Pedro Ramos (Hum 485)
Learning any language inevitably involves learning its phonetics and phonology. However, this pedagogical element is often taken for granted by language teachers in the classroom. As a result, these teachers often rely on their own intuitions with little understanding of the mechanics of their own language being taught and much less that of their students. Although many instructors may succeed in this manner, I want to suggest that recognizing this limitation and beginning to address it through a linguistics orientation has many advantages for both language teacher and student. I discuss several linguistic concepts and their relevancy to the ESL classroom by examining many aspects of the ESL classroom through a linguistics lens and sharing some observations I've made as a linguist of difficulties ESL students encounter. Adopting a pedagogical orientation founded on insights in linguistics and developing a linguistics perspective in the student has much to offer: 1) it has the potential of making the language teacher more sensitive and better able to directly meet the needs of their ESL students; 2) it enables the student to become self-sufficient and motivated by cultivating in them a metalinguistic awareness; and 3) it has the potential of substantially reducing the learning curve of acquiring a new language. To this end, I advocate for bridging the divide between language teacher and linguistics researcher such that linguistics is made an integral part of the ESL classroom for the teacher and most importantly the student.
Playing with Time: Developing L2 Writer Identity through Critical Pedagogy
Hannah Lee (Hum 386)
In the fields of second language learning and composition, it has been increasingly recognized that a successful learning experience at the university is equated with the development of academic writer identity. While there have been numerous studies of how academic writer identity develops in the first and second years of college, our understanding of identity development has not yet been translated into pedagogical approaches in an explicitly critical way.
Based on the framework of critical pedagogy, this paper proposes a curricular model that facilitates development of students' identities as academic writers. In this curriculum, I use two approaches: first, as a metaphorical application of Lemke’s (2002) timescales theory, the curriculum intervenes to shift student perceptions of time—questioning who is allowed to set deadlines, for example, or what it means to be “slow learner” and who decides whether one is “slow” or not. Reflective journals and discussions on student perceptions of time provide novel opportunities for learners to question and resist the often-negative, deficit "ESL" identities assigned to them. Next, the curriculum uses playwriting as a meta-writing process during the pre-writing and revision stages to explore ideas in a creative way, as piloted by Ellis & Murtha (2014). The playwriting exercises aim to decrease anxiety and increase student writers’ sense of authority. As a result, this project raises the broader question: how much responsibility should multilingual learners of English own for resisting negative identities imposed on them, and how much is it really a responsibility of the society around them?
Metaphorical Constructions in Modern Economic Discourse: A Large-Scale Corpus Analysis
Guy Brown & Helena Laranetto (Hum 127)
Our study investigates patterns of metaphoric language used in English economic discourse through corpus linguistics methodology. In particular, we look at how conceptual metaphors are lexicalized in English by probing to set economic phraseology in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003), conceptual metaphors are cognitive structures that map our knowledge from a source domain of our physical experiences to a target domain of abstract ideas.
Economic language, specifically, is based on a complex conceptual model involving several robust metaphors including money is liquid, the economy is a ship; the economy is a weather event; and the economy is an ailing body . These collocation configurations –the words that occur next to one another in running discourse –are part of the hidden structure of our language. But, unlike other asymmetries in language, they aren’t necessarily part of the grammatical apparatus of the language. For example, when discussing business and finance, we say cash flow and not cash stream, but when discussing investment, we say income stream and not income flow. Flow and stream mean the same thing, more or less, but they don’t equally participate in economic jargon.
Our large-scale examination includes 12 metaphorical target triggers to produce roughly 1000 combinatorial phrases, i.e. investment freeze and turbulent market. Our study reveals not only how conceptual metaphors are encoded in lexis, but also provides an intimate assessment of how conceptual metaphors populate syntactic constructions.
2:45-3:15
'Ass': A Newer Intensifier in Colloquial American English
Wilson Miller (Hum 127)
Linguists will tell you—unequivocally—that no language is better than another. For native speakers, regardless of phonological system, syntax, or other linguistic elements, their language is perfectly intelligible. And yet, while linguists whole-heartedly argue this point, non-profane language takes priority in linguistic studies; this perpetuates an alienating perception that research in profane language isn’t worth doing, and constructs a binary opposition between analytically valuable language and language that is analytically invaluable. As a result, studies in profanity are demonized, marginalized, and essentially excluded within Linguistics. Bergen (What the F, 2016) holds a critical view on the exclusion of profanity, and argues that as linguists we need to study profanity—especially in the arena of language change—for the use of expletives or taboo words reflects the socialized views and cognitive operations of language.
Furthering Bergen’s critical stance on the need for the study of profanity, this paper will perform and in-depth study of “ass”—to show the unique and sometimes complex linguistic turns that its usage indexes in particular contexts. Taking both a synchronic and diachronic linguistic perspective, this paper will analyze how “ass” has grammaticalized into an adjectival intensifier in colloquial American English. This analysis highlights and expands on the syntactic, semantic, phonological, and morphological characteristics of this newer function word, as they have been analyzed minutely by previous research, and it will delve into newer topics that have yet to be covered in any academic scholarship, revealing the salient cognitive and linguistic changes that have resulted from the development of the ass intensifier.
Stakeholders' Influences on Developing an Adult ESL Literacy Curriculum
Jasmine Mally (Hum 386)
Students, instructors, and institutions have distinct and overlapping needs that must be analyzed and problematized when designing any curriculum. This presentation specifically takes into account the realities presented by low-literate learners, the different perspectives that need to be considered, and the steps one must take in designing the curriculum once these constraints have been identified and analyzed. This presentation looks at the needs of low-literate adults and the obstacles they face in participating and continuing to attend literacy courses. Factors that may prohibit or discourage them from attending will be described and possible solutions to counteract them will be suggested. These aspects range from unrealistic student goals, their attitudes toward education and literacy, low self-esteem, transportation, finances, time commitment, family responsibilities, and social disapproval. In addition to students, the resources provided by the institution offering the literacy services establishes a basis for the curriculum. Instructors' expertise and background knowledge also play a crucial role in designing effective literacy programs. Instructors are linked to the institution's needs because, often, such literacy programs rely on volunteers. Instructors' education and knowledge may require them to attend training or access to additional support. A curriculum for less experienced teachers should be more detailed to support and educate volunteers in proper teaching techniques while more experienced, well qualified teachers can be given the responsibility to find more resources and adapt the course to their students.