I'm in my office on a Saturday afternoon, waiting for my co-workers to show up so we can continue finishing up our research paper. Long story short: using the Socratic Method with beginner level students won't directly improve their English, but according to our data is does slightly make them feel more comfortable in the classroom, which is a good thing.
One of the limitations of our study is that we only used the SM for three weeks (three classes, basically). Obviously, if we were to do this again we'd want to do it over the course of an entire semester.
Anyhow, we got a bit of a stipend for the work, and basically a free trip to Seoul to the KOTESOL conference, and a bunch of free lunches at relatively nice restaurants (which is a surprisingly critical aspect of working on an academic research project in South Korea).
It's been a good experience, and it's nice to do something that scratches a different part of my brain beyond just teaching, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't stressful. Writing something with two other people is no easy task. One of my co-workers was convinced that we could just divide the writing up in thirds, and I've kind of nagged him from the beginning that that isn't going to work for the final copy. With only a week left before we submit the paper to our boss, he's starting to see what I've been meaning all along.
Writing is easy. Editing is hard. I knew that much going in.
I've learned a lot though, and that's the important thing. I'm also, hopefully, going to get a publication out of it. (Possibly two actually, if we end up splitting our general study and our case study.)
So for the next half hour it's just me and Joe Pass doing yet another round of revision of what we've written so far. Good times.
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