The Thursday “Brown Bag” Lecture Series takes place on Thursdays from 12:00pm to 1:15pm.
Presentation slots for Spring 2023 are now closed.
Unless otherwise noted, all talks will be held in person in Agricultural Science 204; a Zoom option is available for all in-person talks, with links sent to mailing lists the Monday of the week of the talk. Starred (*) talks are internal to SLS faculty, staff, and students.
The following dates and talks are tentative as of December 22, 2022.
Jump to next scheduled talk
Thursday, January 12
A Case for CASE: Developing a Center for Academic Spoken English at UH Mānoa
Dr. Dustin Crowther, Assistant Professor, Second Language Studies, UH: Mānoa
Homare Kanehira, MA Student, Second Language Studies, UH: Mānoa
The Department of Second Language Studies is in the early stages of developing a Center for Academic Spoken English (CASE). The goal of CASE is to provide oral communication support for English as an additional language (EAL) users in the UH Mānoa community. Specifically, the center will promote the development of oral skills of relevance to academic literacy, or “the ability to communicate competently in an academic discourse community” (Wingate, 2015, p. 6). In our presentation, we highlight the initial steps that have been taken to develop CASE during the 2022 spring and fall semesters, our planned pronunciation tutoring service beginning in spring 2023, and our long-term plans for the offering of additional services aimed to benefit the UH Mānoa community in reference to oral communication skills.
Thursday, January 19
Promoting researcher-practitioner engagement with Global Englishes through collaborative research: A multi-phase project
Dr. Jeffrey Maloney, Assistant Professor, Brigham Young University-Hawaii, Faculty of Education & Social Work
There has been ongoing discussion of researcher – practitioner dialogue and how this might improve pedagogy (e.g., Sato & Loewen, 2019) in instructed language acquisition. Similarly, there has been recognition of need to promote Global English perspectives into classroom practice and teacher training within TESOL (e.g., Rose & Galloway, 2019). In this presentation, I report on a multi-phase research project that investigates (1) attitudes of students towards different English varieties at an international university in the USA and (2) the effect of collaborative research on Global Englishes (GE) perspectives of pre-service TESOL professionals. I first discuss the results of the first phase of investigating student perspectives of GEs, where students report similar perspectives towards multiple varieties of English from English-dominant countries except for one. These results will then be followed by exploration of the themes that arose through interviews with the TESOL student collaborators who participated in research design and data collection. Results from analysis show the pre-service TESOL professionals reported changes in perspectives regarding incorporation of additional varieties and assessment practices. I close with a discussion of implications of such collaborative research projects for promoting language pedagogy that incorporates GE perspectives.
Thursday, January 26
A Task-based Needs Analysis of University Students Participating in the Hiroshima-Hawai‘i Project
Namiko Sakoda, Doctoral Student, Educational Design for Teacher Educators Program, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Science, Hiroshima University
This study investigates the communicative needs of university students participating in the Hiroshima Hawaiʻi Project. Needs analysis (NA) is an essential starting point for syllabus design in Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) (Long, 2005, 2015); however, this important stage is often omitted by educational specialists and curriculum designers due to lack of time and resources. This study conducted a NA using triangulated data sources (students, coordinators, administrators, and domain experts) and multiple methods (semi-structured interviews and questionnaires; Long, 2015). 22 interview transcriptions were thematically analyzed, and 10 target tasks were selected based on their relevance to students’ communicative goals. For example, target tasks focused on topics of interest, such as Hawaian culture and history, as well as practical real-world skills, like accessing public transportation or arranging on-campus housing. These target tasks were then used to inform a questionnaire in which stakeholders were asked to rate the difficulty and priority of these 10 tasks. In this talk, I will present the research methods, preliminary results, and pedagogical implications for the design of the TBLT syllabus.
Thursday, February 2
The Effects of Intercultural Experience on Beliefs Regarding English Education in Korea
Sookmyung Women’s University Students
This study uses a survey to investigate the beliefs younger Koreans profess regarding different aspects of English and English Education in South Korea. 141 Koreans were surveyed and divided into 4 groups based on their intercultural experience as evidenced by duration and location of overseas living. A 34-question survey was adapted from the one used by Sakui & Gaies (1999), but with questions divided into five main categories. Responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics to ascertain if there were differences in beliefs expressed by different groups and in what specific areas. Results show that Koreans with more extensive intercultural experience did show different patterns of beliefs in contrast to those with limited or no intercultural experience, regardless of whether those experiences took place in an English-speaking country or not.
Thursday, February 9
Internal presentation for SLS Graduate Students
Thursday, February 16
Language Ideologies, Practices, and Politics amongst New Zealand’s Ukrainian Diaspora
Dr. Corinne Seals, Senior Lecturer, Victoria University of Wellington
While many people around the world became familiar with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, fewer people realize that Ukrainians and Russians had already been at war since late 2013/early 2014. For the past decade, Ukrainians have been protecting their sovereignty, and this has led to what many Ukrainians refer to as the “(re)awakening of a national consciousness”; that is – what it is to be Ukrainian. Language has historically been a major political tool in Ukrainian, Soviet, and pre-Soviet history to dictate who belongs and who doesn’t. Now too, language has played a major role in discourses of what it means to be Ukrainian or not (e.g. the “changing your mother tongue” movement (Seals, 2019)). In this talk, I will first briefly speak to the research I’ve conducted with Ukrainians in the home country and in three host-countries since 2014. Then I will focus in particular on the longitudinal research I’ve conducted with Ukrainians in New Zealand 2014-present, looking at the role of language in identity and belonging in the homeland and hostland. I will also discuss the shifting ideologies and practices in the participants’ family language policies and how these reflect developments and expectations in both Ukraine and New Zealand.
Thursday, February 23
Developer Involvement and Conflict of Interest Disclosure in High-Stakes English Proficiency Test Validation Research: A Systematic Review
Dr. Daniel Isbell, Assistant Professor, Second Language Studies, UH: Mānoa;
Jieun Kim, Ph.D. Student, Second Language Studies, UH: Mānoa
Conflict of interest (COI) is a core research ethics concern, as the conduct of scientific research and production of knowledge should not be distorted or unduly influenced by financial interests or personal biases (Steneck, 2007). While COIs cannot always be avoided, they should be disclosed so that readers can adequately evaluate studies. Similarly, acknowledging funding sources that enable research is an ethical matter: Funders can influence what studies are conducted and may pressure researchers to produce favorable results. In applied linguistics, COI and funding concerns might be most salient in language testing, a subfield with substantial commercial activity and industry involvement in research. Test developer involvement is unavoidable in test validation research, especially at earlier stages of test development, but at some point more critical research by a neutral party is necessary (Kane, 2013, p. 17). Without such research, it is more difficult for the larger public to understand and appropriately use test scores in ways that maximize benefits and minimize harm (Kunnan, 2018).
In this study, we systematically review studies relevant to the validity of high-stakes English proficiency tests published in five leading peer-reviewed language testing journals (Language Testing, Language Assessment Quarterly, Assessing Writing, Language Testing in Asia, and Studies in Language Assessment) from 2016 to 2021. Studies were coded for researcher affiliation, funding sources, conflict of interest disclosure, and broad trends in research methodology such as general approach (quantitative, qualitative, mixed), access to official material (e.g., tests, scores), and sampling. Initial findings based on studies published in 2021 indicate considerable developer involvement (half of 24 studies) and no COI disclosure, though funding sources appear more consistently reported. Developer-involved studies also reported access to official materials and larger sample sizes for quantitative research. Recommendations are made for test developers, journal editors, and language testing researchers.
Thursday, March 2
AAAL Practice Talks #1*
Homare Kanehira, MA Student, Second Language Studies, UH: Mānoa;
Milang Shin, Ph.D. Student, Second Language Studies, UH: Mānoa
AAAL is the leading North American conference for applied linguistics, and the Department of Second Language Studies is well know for our faculty and student representation. To help our students prepare for AAAL, we like to provide opportunities for a practice talk that adheres to the structure of a AAAL talk. Today’s two talks will follow AAAL’s 20-minute presentation + 5-minute Q&A procedure.
Homare Kanehira – Challenges in Transition from Classroom to Workplace: A Study of Japanese Millennial BELF Users
This study examines the challenges Japanese millennials face in using English as a second language in workplaces. As use of English in international business has increased, so has research considering English as a Lingua Franca for Business (BELF) (e.g., Holmes & Marra, 2011; Holmes & Riddiford, 2011; Kankaanranta & Planken, 2010; Louhiala-Salminen et al., 2005). Though the social need to use English at work is increasing as companies seek overseas markets due to shrinking populations (Yonezawa, 2014), Japan remains an underrepresented region in BELF research. As opposed to their older peers, Japanese millennials are “inward-looking” and prefer to stay in their home country with low interest in studying or working abroad (Iino & Murata, 2016). This tendency has caused cases in which unprepared workers were assigned to international tasks that required English communication skills they did not possess. With this unbalancing circumstance in mind, this study addresses the following question: What are some challenges that millennial Japanese BELF users are facing or have faced in their professional lives?
To explore BELF users’ struggles in-depth, narrative data is being collected through semi-structured interviews, with data analyzed using positioning theory (Bamberg, 1997). Participants will include late-20s BELF users living in Japan, working in such professional fields as manufacturing and maritime industry. The preliminary results of two interviews with BELF users in their late 20s indicated both had inner struggles produced by the discrepancy between the English that was seen as ideal when they were in school and the English they currently used in their profession. Through including additional interviews with other millennial BELF users in Japan (N = ~5), this study aims to provide the trajectory and breakthrough moments of becoming BELF users as well as broaden the horizons of BELF research to an overlooked region of BELF use.
Milang Shin – Making community in a convenience store: Multilingual practices in Honolulu
Recent scholarship on superdiversity and sociolinguistics has drawn attention to the role that conviviality plays in intercultural interactions (Blommaert, 2013; Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015; Leung, 2009). The previous studies have shown that people in shared social space as convivial diversity use one another’s languages for producing relationships of mutual dependency and harmony. In this study, I explore local multilingual practices in a convenience store, owned by a multilingual Korean immigrant in Honolulu. Under the theoretical framework metrolingualism (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015), I examine the metrolingual multitasking and spatial repertoires to investigate how the store owner and the customers utilize their diverse linguistic, bodily, and semiotic resources, including the signs in the store and the store’s spatial layout, and how these repertoires function to mark their identities and familiarity with one another to create a shared space of multicultural and multilingual interaction as well as an urban space of community-making and belonging. Using linguistic ethnography and linguistic landscape as a methodological approach, video recordings of interactions between the store owner and her regular customers at a cash register counter, field notes, interviews with the owner and customers, and pictures of signages in- and out of the store are deployed to collect data. The finding reveals that the owner and her regulars mark solidarity for each other through language accommodation, language reappropriation, jokes, and playful embodied actions. These interactions point to the capacity for fleeting, but recurring interactions and social relationships to become more meaningful over time, thus arguably producing friendships, even in a location that is normally reserved for brief service encounters. As for further contribution, this study offers examples of how the repeated and “mundane mobility” (Britain, 2013) of multilingual people interacting in urban areas might be understood as a new form of community-making.
*This talk is internal to SLS students, faculty, and staff.
Thursday, March 9
AAAL Practice Talks #2*
Ann Choe, Ph.D. Student, Second Language Studies, UH: Mānoa;
Hitoshi Nishizawa, Ph.D. Student, Second Language Studies, UH: Mānoa
AAAL is the leading North American conference for applied linguistics, and the Department of Second Language Studies is well know for our faculty and student representation. To help our students prepare for AAAL, we like to provide opportunities for a practice talk that adheres to the structure of a AAAL talk. Today’s two talks will follow AAAL’s 20-minute presentation + 5-minute Q&A procedure.
Ann Tai Choe – A Comparative Analysis of Service-Learners’ Intercorporeal Co-operative Practices in the Classroom and Beyond
While past research has explored service-learning (SL)—an experiential pedagogy that engages students in community-based service activities and reflection on their experiences—in the second language (L2) context (e.g., Poteau, 2020; Wurr & Hellebrandt, 2007), only a few studies have examined participants’ social practices for accomplishing SL in real-time interaction (e.g., Perren, 2007). Furthermore, the nexus between classroom learning and real-world service activities remains underexplored (Overfield, 2007). To inform decisions about L2 education across diverse linguistic and situational contexts, it is important to consider how classroom learning may be linked to out-of-school experiences (e.g., Eskildsen & Majlesi, 2018; Hellermann et al., 2019). This study aims to address this issue by investigating how L2 users achieve SL as a social activity and comparing participants’ practices across different educational settings.
Data come from a larger project that investigates how adult L2 users of English in Hawaiʻi achieve SL as a social activity (approx. 26h of video-recordings). Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study scrutinizes participants’ intercorporeal co-operative practices (Goodwin, 2018; Meyer et al., 2017) in the classroom and beyond. Participants included the L2 users, service agency supervisors, community volunteers, and teachers. Findings revealed that participants frequently employed intercorporeal co-operative actions by producing synchronized or sequentially mirrored actions (Hellermann & Thorne, 2022) during both classroom and service interaction. However, at the service sites (e.g., outdoor fundraising, lantern preparation, letter folding), participants developed and coordinated co-operative actions (e.g., moving and stopping together, bodily transformations) as an activity-specific technique for collaborative task accomplishment, done with or without talk; in contrast, participants in the classroom oriented to achieving intersubjectivity, building affiliation, and invoking humor or shared past experiences via wordplays and reenactment. These findings suggest that SL fosters opportunities for achieving cooperation and intersubjectivity through language and moving bodies across various experiential contexts (Atkinson, 2019).
Hitoshi Nishizawa – Authenticity of listening input: How strong is the shared-L1 effect in more authentic texts?
There is an increasing interest in the authenticity of listening input in language tests. To increase authenticity, scholars advocate the inclusion of L2 accents that represent the sociolinguistic reality of the target language use (TLU) domains (Harding, 2012; Kang et al., 2019). Others have also suggested the use of texts that better reflect the nature of spoken language, including phenomena such as hesitations, false starts, and repetitions (Wagner, 2014). Both approaches have been shown to impact test scores, yet to date, no study has directly compared the effects of each approach nor examined the combination of the two. By investigating the interaction of the two aspects, the present study offers more insight into the relationship between the authenticity of listening input and test scores.
To examine how L2 accent inputs interact with spoken texts, academic lecture texts from IELTS (section 4) were used to create two versions of texts: scripted and authenticated. For the scripted version, original texts were used (Wagner, 2016). For the authenticated texts, texts were rewritten to include spoken language features (Wagner et al., 2021). Audio samples were recorded by an American speaker and a L1 Japanese speaker, who were teaching assistants in the US university. For listeners, Japanese learners of English were recruited to examine the shared-L1 effect.
Data collection is ongoing and a preliminary analysis of 41 listeners (with the planned sample size being 200) found an interaction between accent and scriptedness. The shared-L1 effect was only observed in the scripted texts, but not in the authenticated text. The test score for the authenticated-Japanese text was similar to authenticated-American and scripted-American texts. Building on previous studies, the finding suggests another mediating factor for the shared-L1 effect: scriptedness of the text. Implications for test developers and suggestions for future research will be discussed.
*This talk is internal to SLS students, faculty, and staff.
Thursday, March 16
NO TALK SCHEDULED: Spring Break
Thursday, March 23
NO TALK SCHEDULED
Thursday, March 30
Guest Talks from SLS Visiting Scholars
Youngju Lee,
Wélica Cristina Duarte de Oliveira
Youngju Lee – The Effect of Machine Translation on Revision Process in Academic Settings
This study investigates the effect of machine translation on revision process in academic settings. With the rapid development of technologies, the number of students using machine translation have increased significantly. With the introduction of neural machine translation, the accuracy of machine translation has increased in vocabulary and grammar. Specifically, this study investigates the extent to which machine translation facilitates ESL students’ revision process and what kind of writing strategies ESL students employ. Six Korean students with different English proficiency will participate in the study. Participants will write a short essay in Korean, translate the essay from Korean into English on their own, and then translate the essay using Google Translate. They will then revise their English essay, referring to Google-translated text. During the revision session, the participant will think aloud and explain what they did during this process. Individual interviews will be conducted right after they submit their revised essay, while watching the screen recorded video. The participants’ verbal protocols as well as revision process and strategies captured on the computer screen will be analyzed and summarized. Results of this study will illuminate the promises and challenges of machine translation as a language learning tool.
Wélica Cristina Duarte de Oliveira – EFL in Brazilian Classrooms in Secondary and Higher Education: An Ovierview of Mato Grosso English Learning and Teaching Contexts
Language learning contexts in the fifth largest country in the world may take various forms. Brazil takes one-third of Latin America’s population, it is the only Portuguese speaking country in South America and shares inland borders with almost every country in the region with the exception of Chile and Ecuador. With 26 states and a federal district, it encompasses a diversity that assembles a complex Education project. In this presentation, I intend to focus on learning and teaching English in the contexts of Mato Grosso state, which is the third largest state by area, located in the central-west region, comprising three major biomes, the Amazon forest, areas of Cerrado (savannahs) and the Pantanal (wetlands). As a country that advocates for free education for all, Brazil has free public instruction in all levels (as well as private options), but it still struggles with access and academic under-performance along with many social and regional disparities. In Mato Grosso there are two main free public universities: UFMT – Federal University of Mato Grosso, and UNEMAT-State University of Mato Grosso. Both offer English teaching undergraduate (Letters -Portuguese/English B.A degree) and graduate studies paths. This presentation centers its attention in the latter, specifically in the pedagogic plan developed in the campus located in the city of Tangará da Serra, where most of the EFL teachers receive their degree and teacher training to professionally teach at the state education public schools in the city and neighboring towns. As we take a closer look into Brazilian EFL classrooms in such context, we will reflect on challenges and overcomings (GALLARDO & OLIVEIRA, 2018) in a reality in which elementary and high school students could perceive learning a foreign language like English as a means of inclusion, autonomy (PAIVA, 2009), opportunity and global citizenship, which permeates other areas of society, while teachers (LEFFA, 2012) navigate this process specially concerned with how these perceptions and experiences affect themselves in relation to planning, assessing, weekly workload, methodologies (COX & ASSIS-PETERSON, 2008) as well as institutional language policies and the Brazilian Common Core Curriculum (BNCC).
Thursday, April 6
Why are some learners more successful in learning new speech sounds? The Auditory Precision Hypothesis-L2
Bradford Lee, Fukui University of Technology
Growing evidence suggests a broad relationship between individual differences in auditory processing ability and the rate and ultimate attainment of language acquisition throughout the lifespan, including post-pubertal second language (L2) speech learning. However, little is known about how the precision of processing of specific auditory dimensions relates to the acquisition of specific L2 segmental contrasts. In the context of 100 late Japanese-English bilinguals with diverse profiles of classroom and immersion experience, the current study set out to investigate the link between the perception of several auditory dimensions (F3 frequency, F2 frequency, and duration) in non-verbal sounds and English [r]-[l] perception and production proficiency. Whereas participants’ biographical factors (the presence/absence of immersion) accounted for a large amount of variance in the success of learning this contrast, the outcomes were also tied to their acuity to the most reliable, new auditory cues (F3 variation) and the less reliable but already-familiar cues (F2 variation). This finding suggests that individuals can vary in terms of how they perceive, utilize, and make the most of information conveyed by specific acoustic dimensions. When perceiving more naturalistic spoken input, where speech contrasts can be distinguished via a combination of numerous cues, some can attain a high-level of L2 speech proficiency by using nativelike and/or non-nativelike strategies in a complementary fashion.
Thursday, April 13
Discourses of COFA citizens in Hawai‘i
Sara Lynch, Associated Researcher, Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS) at the University of Bern
Since 1986, citizens of three sovereign nations, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), and the Republic of Palau have been eligible to live and work in the United States (US), join the military and avail of certain US services. The Compact of Free Association (COFA) was brokered by the US in exchange for territorial security, political alliance, and as a form of reparations for the devastation caused by US nuclear testing in Micronesia. Over 30% of citizens from COFA states have left their islands; over 17,000 of whom live in Hawai‘i. My postdoctoral project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation investigates the role of language on the marginalization of COFA citizens in Hawai‘i and the entextualization of Micronesian discourses.
In this talk, I focus on my first study and present my analysis of data sourced from local mainstream news media documenting Micronesian citizens in Hawai‘i. Employing a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, I examine ‘elite racism’ (Van Dijk 1993) and the production and dissemination of prejudicial discourse in the linguistic choices of politicians and journalists. By incorporating procedures from the Discourse-Historical Approach (Wodak and Reisigl 2009), I review the historical emergence of discriminatory discourses by the in the media since before the COFA agreement was established (1980) until present day (2023) in order to determine the development of this public discourse and understand how stigmatization of a minority group may be shaped by community influencers. I, then, contextualize this study within my larger project and give a brief description of my other ongoing investigations.
Thursday, April 20
Publishing accessible academic summaries: a practical workshop for writing to a general audience
The Multi-ōlelo Team (Daniel Holden, Jieun Kim, Rickey Larkin, Michol Miller, Hitoshi Nishizawa, Milang Shin, Kristen Urada, Jue Wang)
In the field of applied linguistics, there has recently been a strong call to bridge the research-practitioner gap. This is especially relevant when disseminating the results of academic research to language teachers and practitioners, and more broadly, to parents, community members, and the learners themselves.During this workshop, the Multiʻōlelo (MO) team will briefly explain their mission is directly related to this issue, and some of the professional benefits of being an active contributor to MO. Then, the primary focus of the session will be to provide a step by step walkthrough of the MO submission process, including a hands-on summary writing activity. We will look at a research article abstract and workshop creative ways to create a summary that will be beneficial to a non-academic audience. We will conclude with a brief explanation of the submission and review process for Multiʻōlelo summaries.
About MO: Multiʻōlelo (MO) is a student-run initiative that began in 2018 with the goal of making applied linguistics research accessible to a non-academic audience (e.g., school teachers, parents) in multiple languages and formats (e.g., written summaries, infographics, podcasts).
Multiʻōlelo Website: https://multiolelo.com Multiʻōlelo Promo Video: https://youtu.be/dChLRie2YG0
Thursday, April 27
A corpus-based study of the impact of extramural activities on L2 student writing
Tove Larsson
In collaboration with Henrik Kaatari, Ying Wang, Seda Acikara Eickhoff, & Pia Sundqvist
Frequent engagement in Extramural English (EE) activities (i.e., out-of-school English-language activities) has been shown to positively influence non-native-speaker high school students’ vocabulary size in English (Sundqvist 2009). In this talk, I present results from a collaborative project that looks at the effect of EE activities on lexical diversity and noun phrase (NP) complexity features in high school student second-language writing. I also introduce a new corpus that is currently being compiled: the Swedish Learner English Corpus. SLEC contains detailed information about how frequently students engage in five EE activities: social media, conversation, reading, watching, and gaming. To look at the effect of EE activities on the students L2 writing development, we used moving average type-token ratio to measure lexical diversity and the rate of occurrence of attributive adjectives and prepositional phrases as modifiers in NPs to measure NP complexity. We also applied measured variable path analysis from the Structural Equation Modeling framework (SEM; see Larsson et al. 2021).
Thursday, May 4
NO TALK SCHEDULED (Last Day of Instruction)