Well, here it is -- the final draft of the research paper that pretty much consumed my entire semester. But it's done, and I'm mostly pretty happy with it. We were all kind of shocked that it came out to 80 pages total.
It went into my school's library collection yesterday, and now we're going to work on whittling it down for publication in an honest-to-Jeebus education journal.
It's official -- writing a paper with two other people is a hell of a lot more difficult than writing it by yourself. Or should I say, editing a paper with two other people.
One of them seems to think a single round of revision is sufficient.
The other just doesn't care.
More specifically, we turned in the general study to the college (80 pages!). Now we're trying to cut that down to 20 pages to submit for publication.
I knew all along this would be the hard part, and my coworkers never believed me.
So basically this week has boiled down to lots of passive / aggressive bullshit and me repeating variations of the phrase "I told you so."
It's 2 a.m. in lurvely Daegu and I just got back from the office where me and my two foreigner co-workers wrapped up our research paper -- "Socrates in the Beginner E.F.L. Classroom."
I think we were all shocked when the damn thing came out to 80 pages total, albeit with a healthy number of graphs and charts.
We're having a fancy schmancy lunch with our boss tomorrow to celebrate. Honestly, I'd rather just sleep in.
But it's done.
We already need to start cutting it down to a presentable journal publication length.
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.
I just did my first batch of case study surveys and interviews for the research paper. Four solid hours, after three hours of teaching my usual stuff.
I think we're on to some interesting data but jeebus, I'm tired.
I did manage to watch some highlight clips of the debate. And it's clear to me now that I really don't appreciate sharing a planet, let alone a country, with Trump supporters.
It's near the end of week four of the semester, and my research project continues apace. Me and my two foreigner co-workers have collected data on foreign language anxiety (F.L.A.) in the form of a peer-reviewed survey, and we also collected less formal voice and video recordings of our students telling us what they like or don't like about studying and using English.
The real fun begins next week when we bring in sample students for longer interviews. Half of them have been studying in classes which have employed Socratic-style seminars, and half of them have been in control groups without the seminars.
The seminars themselves were 30-45 minute exchanges where we arranged the desks into concentric circles and we sat down with the students rather than standing at the classroom podium / computer stand. The goal was to immerse them into a much more peer-oriented, less teacher-oriented environment than they're used to.
We won't have all our data collected for another two weeks but so far it seems as if we're going to confirm what might have been obvious all along -- the students really seemed to enjoy engaging with us in a more level, egalitarian manner, but given their status as limited English proficient learners (L.E.P.) there was only so far a purely Socratic style, question-based lesson could go.
Still, it'll be interesting to see if the students who did the seminars have more confidence or a more positive take on their own English learning than the ones who didn't. We shall see!
The first week of the new semester is now halfway over and me and my foreigner co-workers have already started collecting data for our research paper, which actually feels great.
With help from one co-worker, we set up all of our classes with websites through band.us. I've been meaning to integrate more technology into my classes for a while now, and band really makes it easy. Within a literal few minutes, each student in each of my classes so far was able to join our class site and then take a F.L.A. survey (Foreign Language Anxiety) through Google docs. For their first assignment of the year they'll make a roughly one minute voice recording or video answering questions regarding their feelings about English (Do you enjoy speaking it? Is it important for your future?) which they'll upload back to the class website. This will establish a base line for us to measure any potential success (or failure!) we make through our pedagogical intervention.
So by the end of the week I should have two distinct sets of date from roughly 150 students. Multiply that by three, since my two foreigner co-workers are doing the same thing. Serious E.S.L. (technically, E.F.L.) business!
Analyzing all that data? Well, I'm going to be a very busy foreigner this semester but it's nice that we've finally made it from the amorphous "What the hell are we doing here?" stages to the actual implementation of a plan.
I'll write more later about what our actual research questions are, but they have to do with separating classes into regular control groups and experimental groups where we'll teach for one of two class hours using the Socratic Method.
Kind of ambitious with beginner level Korean college students, no?
