Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Month: March 2021

  • TBLT Prep: Meta

    I get the first inkling that I have a handle on this book. The mountain of meta-analyses is not so high. It is all starting to come together.

    That feeling that you finally understand the book, the topic, what the authors are trying to get across. If you are older, you might use the term “grok” (from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land). Things just start fitting together and everything becomes a little easier.

    There are 46 references in TBLT (the book) about “meta.” 44 are about meta-analyses. They lead to only 11 studies, 3 of which are by Li, one of the authors of the TBLT book. I am going to skip the meta-analysis of neuro-imaging (Jobard 2003). This is a manageable read before my deadline for the second reading, April 10. I hope I can find them all.

    On April 10, I switch to the 3rd reading, my favorite, preparing materials for the participants.

    April 10 (Friday, 6AM GMT, 3PM Japan, Thursday evening in the Americas) is a panel discussion for the Great Minds series of courses. Course leaders (and I would argue the others are great minds themselves), Scott Thornbury, Dorothy Zemach, Steven Herder and I will talk about why and how we chose our topics and books. Not to miss (it will be recorded).

    Today Reading (0:56 Ch. 1) and Blogging (0:24)

    Previously: Announcement. Book. Selection. 3Readings. FirstRead. BloodBrainBarrier. Serendipity. SecondRead. Interview. Bibliography. Authors.

    Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.

  • TBLT Prep: Authors

    The close look at the bibliography has lead me to two authors. TBLT looks at 5 different perspectives, and I have found the sociocultural perspective the most different from the others. So this last week I have been reading Lantolf and authors related. This week the same with Dornyei, and authors related.

    So not much more to report on preparation style, except that it includes lots of reading. The exciting part is making the connections, as I fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle. Pretty typical research.

    Previously: Announcement. Book. Selection. 3Readings. FirstRead. BloodBrainBarrier. Serendipity. SecondRead. Interview. Bibliography

    Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.

  • TBLT Prep: The Bibliography

    Someone somewhere, in my grad school era, opined that the most important part of any research book is the bibliography, and if one was short for time, that should come first.

    Situating any book in the field is vital to a researcher. A kind of due diligence and critical look at the contents.

    Getting the bibliography for this book into a text-readable form took days. Kindle reader (and the publisher) would only let me download a bit at a time. I have used up most of my 10% limit to get the 41 pages of references. I can continue to highlight, the subject of the next post.

    Copy and pasting meant the line feeds were not included, meaning huge blocks of text. I spent many a meeting mindlessly finding author names, and adding two line feeds (return key) to format everything (as I listened, of course).

    Once in digital forms, we can look at it through a word-cloud, above, which is pretty useless. Below is a list of names and publishers; Ellis, Skehan, Robinson. Swain was surprising, such a strong showing. Dornyei missed a few because of his umlaut. Long established researchers had the advantage here.

    The Concepts list is not surprising, except perhaps the low ranking of the word Motivation. You’d think that would be mentioned more often as it is central to language learning. More to explore.

    These will help me continue to puzzle out which 2-3 articles to read for each chapter as I progress a second time through the book.

    Authors/Publishers

    71 oxford
    70 cambridge
    61 ellis
    59 benjamins
    46 skehan
    29 robinson
    22 tblt
    22 swain
    20 ma
    20 lantolf
    18 routledge
    18 li
    18 gass
    17 mackey
    16 lambert
    15 ortega
    14 macmillan
    14 kim
    13 williams
    13 palgrave
    12 longman
    11 norris
    11 lyster
    11 erlbaum
    11 basingstoke
    10 sheen
    10 loewen
    10 clevedon
    9 willis
    9 shintani
    9 mahwah
    9 gilabert
    8 vygotsky
    8 schmidt
    8 rowley
    8 newbury
    8 nassaji
    8 lloret
    8 lawrence
    8 gonz
    8 doughty
    8 branden
    7 zhang
    7 harlow
    7 gruyter
    7 erlam
    7 blackwell
    7 ahmadian
    6 vanpatten
    6 sato
    6 Dornyei
    6 philp
    6 pergamon
    6 mouton
    6 horwitz
    6 edwards
    6 beretta
    6 baralt
    5 wigglesworth
    5 wang
    5 tavakoli
    5 storch
    5 springer
    5 shehadeh
    5 reinders
    5 poehner
    5 lapkin
    5 krashen
    5 housen
    5 crookes
    5 bloomsbury
    5 alderson

    CONCEPTS

    617 language
    265 task
    233 second
    179 learning
    156 teaching
    130 acquisition
    100 university
    99 research
    69 tasks
    56 linguistics
    52 interaction
    46 feedback
    46 classroom
    43 development
    37 planning
    37 learners
    36 instruction
    33 assessment
    31 learner
    30 memory
    29 working
    29 oral
    28 cognitive
    27 education
    26 tesol
    26 corrective
    23 technology
    23 anxiety
    22 tblt
    22 system
    15 motivation
    15 international

    Today Reading (1:12 Ch. 10) and Blogging (0:42)

    Previously: Announcement. Book. Selection. 3Readings. FirstRead. BloodBrainBarrier. Serendipity. SecondRead. Bibliography

    Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.

  • TBLT Prep: The impromptu interview

    I showed up at our bi-weekly group intending to discuss a different topic. It turns out many others could not attend this session, so Maria decided to ask me about my iTDi course as part of the Great Minds series. I wish I had prepared a bit, and Sunday night at 10pm lead to some lapses. Apologies. The interview is about the first 20 minutes of this video.

    I was able to talk about Great Minds and how it came about, then focus on TBLT, the book, how the research is done, who is not mentioned, how it relates to projects and SLA, and how it fits into language teaching and research. I hope it provides a small window onto the course, but I have yet to get on to the 3rd reading, during which I create the course structure. More about that later.

    I promised to mention a book I talked about, but have not read. Task-Based Language Learning in a Real-World Digital Environment. Edited by Paul Seedhouse (2017). More later on this…distraction?

    Today Reading (0:34 Ch. 3) and Blogging (0:28)

    Previously: Announcement. Book. Selection. 3Readings. FirstRead. BloodBrainBarrier. Serendipity. SecondRead.

    Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.

  • TBLT Prep: Second Reading

    Once the first reading is finished and I have a feeling for the shape of the book and topic, now is the time to dive deep. I read a chapter and pick out one or two references and access those if I can. Doing this far ahead allows me time to get the articles I want.

    The second reading serves more than one purpose, though. I need to fill in the holes, so I build a schema, a background database of interesting facts and conjectures. That means taking lots of notes. Now that I know what a Task is, I can be on the lookout to build a set of sample Tasks that I can use for the third reading (teacher reading).

    I start mapping out where information is that will appeal to different types of participants. It will allow flexibility to more research-oriented, or teacher-oriented particpants.

    This second reading allows me to create a grounding, look for patterns, find out who and what is more important. I focus on typical practices in both research and teaching.

    I develop a taste for the flavor of authors (Ellis, Robinson, Li, etc), how each one writes, thinks, and what they believe. I can also put a perimeter on the topic by noting down what is not there. What about SLA? CALL? Steven Krashen and Beniko Mason? David Nunan?

    Reading (Wed 0:32 Ch. 1, Fri 0:56 Ch 2, Sat. 1:13 Ch 3, Thu 1:22 Robinson 2011, Sun 0:55 Long 2014) and Blogging (0:36)

    Previously: Announcement. Book. Selection. 3Readings. FirstRead. BloodBrainBarrier. Serendipity.

    Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.