Notes on Direct and Indirect Access to Corpora: An Exploratory Case Study Comparing Students’ Error Correction and Learning Strategy Use in L2 Learning by Hyunsook Yoon & Jung Won Jo (2014) pt1

Yoon, H., & Jo, J. W. (2014). Direct and indirect access to corpora: An exploratory case study comparing students’ error correction and learning strategy use in L2 writing. Language Learning & Technology, 18, 96-117.

Introduction

• Data-driven learning (DDL) has shown positive effects to L2 learning.
• There are advantages and disadvantages in in-/direct use of the corpora.
• Research gap #1: comparative examination of both; hopes to address course and material design in how “L2 is taught and learned” (p. 98). Specifically, the “possible differences in student’s correction behavior” (p. 99) in both settings.
• Research gap #2: studies investigating learner strategies in corpus use and concordance analysis. “This is a critical missing link that should be established for corpus-based learning in the whole framework of L2 pedagogy” (p. 99).

Research Questions:

1. Can corpus-based writing revision improve the students’ grammatical and lexical accuracy?
2. What are students’ error correction patterns relative to direct and indirect corpus use, and is there any difference in the effectiveness of such patterns?
3. What learning strategies do the learners employ in direct and indirect corpus use?

Methodology

• Subjects: Four freshmen EFL students with varying level of English and interest in English writing.
• Data Collection: Quantitative and qualitative. Collection of students’ writing, introspective and retrospective reports.
• Duration: 10 weeks, from March 28 to May 30, 2011.
• Online corpus: Lextutor

Salida-Salida

            I ride the bus to school. Every day of the week I do. This day is nothing special because they are all. However, I have made some linguistic observation and hypothesis on the Spanish and Cebuano word salida.

            Salida in Spanish means [to] exit or departure while in Cebuano it relates to a show whether on the television, radio, or a fair. So I thought that there must be a connection between the Spanish and Cebuano word. They ‘look’ the same but semantically means different. I cannot really figure it out using these two linguistic inventories so I called for help. I’m glad I did. So, I called out to the Filipino language.

            In Filipino, the word for a show with the same semantic value to the word salida in Cebuano is palabas. I broke down the Filipino word as pa-labas where the morpheme pa- means moving towards something and -labas refers to ‘outside’. Taking it in, I then realized why Cebuano uses salida to mean a show.

            Cebuano takes the literal valence, or morphology, of the Filipino word pa-labas as to be with the literal translation salida of Spanish but adhered to the meaning of the Filipino word. Therefore, our Cebuano word salida is a false cognate of the Spanish word salida. It doesn't directly adopt the Spanish word but changed as much as what was observed above. 
            Also, it seems like the word appears foreign but its heartbeat---Filipino.

Side note: The Spanish first stepped in to the Philippines soil through Cebu. They took over the islands for over three centuries. This is why such linguistic activities in Cebuano is of interest.

Notes on Religious Literacies in a Secular Literacy Classroom: Implications & Views (2014)

Skerrett, A. (2014). Religious literacies in a secular literacy classroom. Reading
Research Quarterly, 49, 233-250. doi:10.1002/rrq.65

“As with literacy scholarship and research, a just as troubling condition persists in public schoolstoday: anxiety, fear, and lack of professional knowledge and direction about engaging religious literacies in school (Bishop & Nash, 2007; Noddings, 2008). This silencing of religious discourses in school limits opportunities for the teaching and learning of literacy.” (p. 248)

IV. Implications and conclusions

1. For educational practice
1. There are opportunities for teaching and learning literacy while drawing on religious literacies.
2. How literacy education can be more fully informed with religious literacies must be substantiated through theorizing and description.
3. As shown in the present study, a teacher’s pedagogy of multiliteracies allowed continual connections among all context of and literacy; students draw on complex religious literacies to make meaning of the text; and emphasis on shared values and commitment must be stressed.
2. For literacy theory and research
1. With multiplicity in cultures and languages, with the rise of transnationals, research consideration of students’ literacy practices, including religious literacies in the classroom must not be muted.

Since they are potential tools for developing academic literacies.

Also, openness, respect and intellectual curiosity enables students to make use of students’ religious literacies across the official curriculum

2. Teachers should also explore their own religious identities, knowledge, beliefs, and practices and understand how these can also be manifested with their students.
3. Teachers, and those who teach and work with them in classrooms, may explore theoretical and pedagogical approaches that enable identification of, and productive engagement with, the range of potential resources for learning that students bring to school.

This will yoke interactions and can be productive how students’ religious literacies can bear fruitful relationship with other literacies that they and the curriculum value.

V. Personal Questions/Views

1. What components of literacy is she talking about?
2. Is it because they are children that they are not apprehended on these religious literacy expressions in the classroom?
3. The study provides a fresh perspective as to where religious literacy fits in the classroom and how it interacts with other literacies within the academic context.
4. The implications of the study invites decisiveness in the pedagogical framework schools adopt in order to harness multiliteracies without stripping student identities and curricular goals.

Notes on Religious Literacies in a Secular Literacy Classroom: Research Questions pt2 (2014)

Skerrett, A. (2014). Religious literacies in a secular literacy classroom. Reading
Research Quarterly, 49, 233-250. doi:10.1002/rrq.65

“As with literacy scholarship and research, a just as troubling condition persists in public schoolstoday: anxiety, fear, and lack of professional knowledge and direction about engaging religious literacies in school (Bishop & Nash, 2007; Noddings, 2008). This silencing of religious discourses in school limits opportunities for the teaching and learning of literacy.” (p. 248)

2. How did students, in response to the teacher’s invitations and through their own agency, engage their religious literacies in the classroom?

1. Students, with their teacher’ s support, recruited their religious literacies (2) for analyzing and understanding secular literature and (3) for producing academic writing.

(3)

Mrs. Campbell assigned a six-week writing of a memoir. Vanesa, one of the focus student is highlighted to draw conclusion on how religious literacies inform and not obstruct academic literacy performance.

Her memoir is about her grandmother who died on a salon still doing what Vanesa understood to be her mission. Her grandma’s mission is not dying in the salon, thankfully, but giving ribbons that are thought to have healing powers to those who believe in them.

Her title “The Last tear!:)”. Evidently enough, her religious literacy showed up in the mention of her grandma being a woman of “faith”, living with a reason and mission in the world, being touched by God, having a vision and setting out on a pilgrimage.

Remarkable amount of religious knowledge can be sifted in her presentation but it is equally evident that her religious literacy serves her literary and academic goals. She doesn’t only parrot socio-culturally informed religious beliefs but creatively envisioned them, for instance life after death. She described eternally beautiful body, leisurely walks with God who is now visibly present, fragrant maple trees and tall grasses wrapped in soft, cold comforting breezes.

Thus, students draw, as in the example of Vanessa on her multiliteracy practices for meaning-making and designing meaning for her written composition. Furthermore, she employed different semiotic systems.

But one can ask, is it just because they are children that they are not apprehended on these literacy expressions? I believe here is a literacy framework will come in. Mrs. Campbell employs the theoretical framework provided by NLG that acknowledges that interconnections and interstices among literacies, as focused in this study is student’s religious literacy, language and culture are helpful to literacy development and practice.

3. What were the outcomes of the teacher and students’ transactions with religious literacies in school?

1. (4) Religious literacies in the classroom produced tensions that the students and teacher navigated by emphasizing a shared value of human empathy and their shared commitment to classroom community, pursuing understanding of one another’s perspectives and seeking underlying commonalities of different, or differently articulated, religious beliefs.

(4)

At this point of the research, the class is moving from symbolism to foreshadowing. Mrs. Campbell shared how she found dead birds in her garden while she was pregnant with her first son and shortly after birth her son died. After Mrs. Campbell told that the dead bird story is an instance of foreshadowing. See p. 245 for transcript.

Nina reflects her religious lifeworld in asking this, that is, making meaning in life’s tragedies. Even when Mrs. Campbell cringed to the depth of conversation she feels they are heading, Nina is not offended or silenced by their difference. Here we see that regardless of differences tensions in the classroom with the inclusion of religious literacies boils down to shared values and commitment, in this instance to human empathy.

On another tension in the classroom, Nina saw Darius laughing on the way Carlo has interpreted the Monkeyman story through the picture Carlo’s presented in the class, like Jesus on the cross. Darius affirmed that the picture Carlos had is funny, because nothing could compare to what Jesus did.

The researcher viewed that Nina’s argument is whether or not the depiction of the character tries to surpass what Jesus did but whether Darius are really engaging to understand the interpretation of Carlos.

On another transcript, Nina expanded the conversation pointing out 3 boys in class that laugh every time other students talk about God. After Mrs. Campbell asked if the boys and Nina go to church, Nina without missing a beat added that they don’t act like it. So Mrs. Campbell tries to relieve the tension in the grounds of making judgements and asking if they can work it out.

Mrs. Campbell employed a strategy that reminds the student to prioritize their commitment to healthy classroom community and refrain from discursive patterns that threatened. Thus, even the precepts of preserving good relations are related to the identified Christians in the classroom.

Tensions also rise when there is confusion of identities. One moment, Nina is flirty and on another wants to write about God.

But tensions encourage students and teachers to generate and articulate understandings about how students might engage their religious literacies to their academic learning. Here is where the teacher’s professional responsibility comes in when she strategizes stressing out healthy classroom community as to defuse rising hostility and damage.

Additional knowledge of students’ religions of the teacher is also considered, which help clear articulation and critical exploration of religious differences, which Mrs. Campbell is limited of such additional knowledge. Positively enough, the stance of multiliteracies yoked students own religious knowledge have still addressed rising conflicts on religious literacies in school.

In this section, it is important to note that members of the classroom are invited and inquired to pursue understanding of one another’s perspectives and sough underlying common ground across different, or differently expressed, religious beliefs.