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Research
Informed
by my previous research and teaching experiences that EFL students
who failed to make a satisfactory progress through English classes at different levels
lacked motivation, adequate amount of English vocabulary,
necessary grammatical knowledge, and meaningful exposure to
authentic English, I targeted my initial research in the courses
taken at Indiana University at the encoding & decoding level of
language learning. However, as my research interests
expanded to include critical literacy, critical thinking,
critical pedagogy, CALL (Computer-Assisted Language
Learning), distance education, I conducted research and wrote articles on issues
related to these new fields.
My first research paper was
written as part of L630 (Theory into Practice in Language Education) on
"Glossing as a scaffold for
vocabulary learning and reading comprehension:
An action
research and its implications for EFL teaching in Thai universities."
My past research experiences and the first inquiry course at IU,
Y520, allowed me to see complexity of relevant factors and the research
was somehow ambitious. I found it difficult to make the diverse
literature focused on my issues at first, but later managed to delete
unrelated studies. At a later stage, I also learned from a final
project in Y520 about how to write
a more precise
literature review.
In the second semester, I
continued to conduct three inter-related research projects at the
encoding & decoding level:
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EFL Readers: Past and
Present, a qualitative study of three Thai graduate students'
English learning experiences, background knowledge and skills in
English, struggles as graduate students and so on. I found
that these three students of different levels of English proficiency
based on their TOEFL scores differed virtually systematically under
the themes that emerged in the interview and other data. The ones
with lower background in English revealed the flaws in her learning
experiences that contributed to her more obvious difficulties in her
graduate study. This paper was given an A- because Professor did not
like the less qualitative look of it although I had adopted all his
comments and suggestions. He criticized his own suggested themes as
less evident or interesting! He also did not see that the section on
the quantitative data about the students' differed levels of
proficiency as necessarily a research question, which I agreed, but
I still think that quantitative methods should not be seen as
inappropriate, but as complementary, in a qualitative study.
-
Peeling EFL readers: A case study of
three graduate students from Thailand, a quantitative study of
the same three graduate students that dig deeper in a quantitative
fashion. I was always wondering how learners of different
levels achievements in English approached difficult reading
materials when they lacked either the knowledge of advanced English
structures and vocabulary. The study revealed dangers
associated with methods used to compensate while reading a difficult
text with unknown words and confused grammatical structures.
This paper was awarded an A from Dr. Mikulecky.
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The relationships between knowledge
of academic vocabulary and structures and other variables related to
EFL reading achievements among Thai undergraduate students, A
correlational study that explored potential relationships between
knowledge of academic vocabulary and structures of English and other
variables related to reading among undergraduate students at Chiang
Mai University. Given that I conducted this research during
the same semester as the other two projects above and that I had to
request help from my colleagues in Thailand to administer the tests
and questionnaires from the distance. This paper was awarded
an A.
The above research experiences
almost convinced me that I was ready for more serious research on these
hard-core TESOL issues, but the courses that I took in the third
semester introduced new dimensions of language education that have
changed my research interests immensely. A new experience started
a little before the Fall 2002 semester, when I was part of a qualitative
study team composed of a group of graduate students under Dr. Sharon
Pugh on the expectations and actual experiences of graduate students at
IU, see In Their Own Words.
It gave me a lot of insights into a whole research procedure involving a
team. It indeed inspired my further research with other colleagues
in later semesters. The other two courses, L600 (Dr. Mitzi Lewison) and
L750 (Dr. Jerome Harste), totally changed the ways I looked at language
education. In L600, I analyzed the literature and wrote a few
papers on the meanings, scopes and dimensions of critical literacy,
critical thinking, and critical pedagogy. They were all new to me,
and the pictures were vague. The papers included:
In L750, I spent
almost the whole semester trying to understand the underlying ideology
behind what was discussed in the course. I realized that the course
encouraged multiple ways of inquiry and knowledge construction. I
invited two other friends to conduct a self-study in which the three
members picked a topic and investigate it while also reflecting on what
changes occurred through the process and as a result of the group
dynamics. We titled our study, "On
the Road to Becoming More Critical Researchers/ Teachers/ and
Information Consumers" and the project was awarded an A.
During Fall, 2003, I pursued my
interest in critical literacy with Dr. Carter. We reflect on our
one-semester experience unpacking and repacking the term 'critical
literacy' and found that there was no consensus among people working in
different contexts. Based on our shared experiences reading a wide
range of articles and passionate discussions, we each wrote an article
to reflect our learning. I chose the title,
Critical Literacy as 'Compromisation',
arguing based
on my worldviews as a Buddhist that taking the radical stance suggested
by Paolo Freire, the Father of Critical Pedagogy, may lead to ignorance
among educators of different ways that the world may work without
destroying the oppressive status quo.
During Spring, 2003, I started my
minor courses in IST (Instructional Systems Technology). I became
interested in
research foci on the use of an
asynchronous CMC tool, text-based discussion forum
and wrote a literature review on the topic. At the same time, I
also expanded my interest in critical thinking by designing a course
titled, "Critical Thinking for Teachers" with some help by Dr. Faridah
Pawan to submit for a grant from the U.S. Department of State.
Although the course did not win the grant, I developed it further and
used it as as part of an instructional design assignment in the R685
(Technology and Teacher Training). The complete course is
available online at
http://thinsan.org/nf/L530/index.htm.
Also during Spring, 2003, I worked
with Malinee Prapinwong on a research project
titled, "Thinking outside the box: Lessons
from a public forum" under Dr. Martha Nyikos' supervision. The
paper was presented a the CALICO 2004, Carnegie Melon University, PA. In
this project, we initially tried to capture the knowledge construction
and idea exchanges among participants in a Thai web-based forum with the
framework by Garrison, et al (2001), particularly the Cognitive Presence
taxonomy. However, we found that the data could not be captured
adequately by the Garrison et al framework, so we went on to devise our
own taxonomy and use it to capture a large portion of data. We
found that learning took place in sophisticated manners in an online
community, and we concluded that language teachers can learn several
lessons from this project. Concurrently, I worked with four other
graduate students on an investigation of issues related to critical
literacy. We watched the film "The Last Samurai" and shared our
diverse takes on critical issues, particularly those concerning
diversity and multicultural education. Our papers was accepted for
presentation at
he Fourth International Diversity Conference, UCLA,
during summer 2004, but only Akiko Hagiwara and I were able to attend.
We titled our presentation as, "The
Diversity Issues in The Last Samurai,"
and the paper was later refereed and published with Common Ground
Publishing, Australia.
During Fall, 2004, I took an online
course in English for Specific Purposes and complete a course design
process. The report, which includes details about needs analysis,
discourse/genre analysis, course outline, sample lesson plans, and
evaluation plans, is available online at
http://www.thinsan.org/L630ESP/. At the same time, I did an
individual reading under Dr. Jerome Harste's supervision on the new
aspects of critical literacy. I took the opportunity to connect my
extended interests in peace education and spiritual aspects of literacy
education with what I had learned thus far. I titled my paper, "Structural
Violence, Critical Literacy, and Spirituality in Education," and
this article reflects my current interest in making language education
part of world problems. During this same semester, I had the
opportunity to explore online pedagogy and evaluation, as well as to
experiment with some community building tools. I became interested
in e-education and wrote a paper to analyze and criticize the IT policy
of Thailand. The paper, titled "e-Education
for all when the national IT policy lacks pedagogical spirits:
A case of e-Thailand"
was accepted and I was invited as a student delegate to participate in
the E-ducation
Without Borders 2005 in Abu Dhabi, UAE, in 2005.
In Spring, 2005, I chose to explore
issues outside the School of Education by taking a course in
Anthropology of Human Rights. This course expanded my world views from the human rights activists' diverse, and often
conflicting, perspectives. It has also made me believe that
language education should be made to create responsible local, national
and world citizens,
and I have realized that critical thinking in language education can
bridge the gaps between the encoding & decoding-oriented language
education and language education for peace or spirituality. I have
definitely moved very far from where I began my journey at IU.
Ironically, however, my last
instructional
design project did not ignore the needs to scaffold the learners'
encoding & decoding efforts.
In summary, a hard-core EFL
teacher by training, I have not only strengthened my research skills,
but also
embraced new dimensions of language education beyond encoding and decoding
pedagogy, which
dominated my training prior to my arrival at IU. The new fields, critical
thinking, critical literacy, and
critical pedagogy, among others, were
not unequivocally aligned nor distinguished for me; so, I had to
unpack
relevant ideas and develop my own understanding of these fields in
relation to language education.
Where I stand now in terms of
research interests and my next journey are summarized under
Next Journey.
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