Jean Kaya | Southern Illinois University Carbondale (original) (raw)
Papers by Jean Kaya
Educational Linguistics
Student teaching has been conceptualized as an experience that translates into ample teaching pra... more Student teaching has been conceptualized as an experience that translates into ample teaching practice and meaningful teacher knowledge. Such a conceptualization misses issues that emerge from student teaching as social practice (i.e., the distinctive ways people engage in activities associated with a particular domain of knowledge in a specific social context). Using interview data from a larger qualitative study that investigated pre-service teachers’ learning experiences, I conducted a discourse analysis of Lany’s perspective on her student teaching experience. Unlike other student teachers, Lany perceived the social practices at her placement to be unjust, holding student teaching with contempt and wanting it shortened. Findings indicated an expectations-reality dissonance in student teaching and the reproduction of socially constructed school norms and unequal social relations between school personnel and Lany. These constrained Lany’s abilities to practice teaching and shaped ...
Linguistics and Education, 2018
This study investigates the narratives of Marla, a 25-year old bilingual and biliterate transnati... more This study investigates the narratives of Marla, a 25-year old bilingual and biliterate transnational Latina mother. Data for this study came from an overarching ethnographic narrative inquiry study that investigated how five women tutors in a neighborhood literacy initiative constructed, enacted, and expressed their literacy identities. Marla's narratives illuminated a spatial and temporal framework that warranted a closer, more nuanced look at how she positioned herself in time and space. The authors inquired into what Marla's narratives suggested about her constructions of literacy and identity. Specifically, we focus on Marla's use of deictics, which illuminated a sophisticated storying of self that she used to position herself as a global citizen, a good student, and a mature family woman. Findings highlight how Marla restoried herself, constructing a new "now" self that she actualized in the present as she imagined a new future for her and her family.
The present study investigated the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that En... more The present study investigated the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that English language teachers in Congo encourage students to use, and the strategies that Congolese students actually use to build their vocabulary. Finding out whether the students\u27 most used strategies were teacher-encouraged or independently learned was another point of interest. A Likert-scale of 34 statements and four short-answer questions was designed to collect data. The participants included 20 male and 23 female Congolese learners of English of ages 18 to 22, all of them students in the Arts program at the Reconciliation High School in Brazzaville, Congo. Statistical and content analysis methods were employed. Attention to suffixes was the only strategy that showed a significant difference between the teacher encouraged and student used strategies. Two other strategies, guessing word meanings from context and learning words in collocations approached significance, but the difference between teacher encouragement and student use was not of practical importance. This strong correspondence between the strategies that teachers frequently encourage and students\u27 use provided evidence about the important role that language teachers play in students\u27 learning in general, and in strategy in particular. Quantitative results revealed contextual guessing and dictionary use to be the most frequently used strategies, whereas pronunciation was the least frequently used. Participants\u27 narrative descriptions revealed that notebooks and notepads were frequently used in participants\u27 independent learning of vocabulary. Furthermore, 52.38% (N= 22) of the participants attributed their frequently-used strategies to their teachers\u27 practices and advice while 38.10% (N= 16) claimed that their strategies were independently learned. In view of theory and empirical research, the present study provided evidence that Congolese learners of English are taking responsibilities about their vocabulary learning progress by employing a variety of strategies, some of them acquired as a result of classroom learning, whereas others developed in their independent learning outside of school
International Journal of English Language Education, 2014
This study emphasized the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that English lan... more This study emphasized the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that English language teachers encourage students to use, and the strategies that students actually use to build their vocabulary. Finding out whether the students' most used strategies were teacher-encouraged or independently-learned was another point of interest. The participants included 20 male and 23 female learners of English of ages 18 to 22, all of them students in the Arts program at a Southern Congolese high school. They completed a Likert-scale questionnaire of 34 statements and four short-answer questions. Statistical and content analysis methods were employed. The study revealed contextual guessing and dictionary use to be the most frequently encouraged and used strategies, whereas pronunciation and flashcards were the least frequently encouraged and used. These strategies showed no significant difference between the teacher-encouraged and the student-used strategies, which provided evidence about the important role that language teachers play in students' learning in general, and in strategy in particular. Furthermore, the majority of participants attributed their frequently-used strategies to their teachers' practices and advice. Further discussion stresses the potential reasons why pronunciation receives less attention.
Language and Literacy
Critical literacy is a pedagogy that serves to mediate social justice issues and educate for tran... more Critical literacy is a pedagogy that serves to mediate social justice issues and educate for transformative social action. We present a systematic review of how critical literacy has been incorporated in Canada’s provincial/territorial curriculum documents since the late 1990s and integrated in K-12 classrooms in the last decade. Our analysis shows that critical literacy has been addressed with varying degrees of explicitness in curricula, and there is an imbalance of studies on critical literacies among provinces and territories. We discuss implications and encourage stakeholders in education to explicitly embed critical literacy into curricula and promote critical literacy practices in the classroom.
Journal of International Students
Substantial research emphasizes recruitment and retention of international students over their li... more Substantial research emphasizes recruitment and retention of international students over their lived experiences. This qualitative study employed a sociocultural lens to explore five international graduate students’ lived experiences in the United States and their postgraduation plans. Findings suggest that international graduate students navigate a World that encompasses individual worlds that revolve around challenges, opportunities, and imagined communities. I draw on Gee’s (2014) notion of capitalizing a word normally written in lower case to make clear two differing connotations of the word “world.” I discuss implications for higher education host institutions and their offices of international education.
Journal of Latinos and Education
This article employs counterstorytelling to present a layered, nuanced rendering of two bilingual... more This article employs counterstorytelling to present a layered, nuanced rendering of two bilingual, bicultural Latinas’ school leaving. Data were taken from an ethnographic narrative inquiry into th...
The Handbook of Critical Literacies
This study emphasized the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that English lan... more This study emphasized the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that English language teachers encourage students to use, and the strategies that students actually use to build their vocabulary. Finding out whether the students’ most used strategies were teacher-encouraged or independently-learned was another point of interest. The participants included 20 male and 23 female learners of English of ages 18 to 22, all of them students in the Arts program at a Southern Congolese high school. They completed a Likert-scale questionnaire of 34 statements and four short-answer questions. Statistical and content analysis methods were employed. The study revealed contextual guessing and dictionary use to be the most frequently encouraged and used strategies, whereas pronunciation and flashcards were the least frequently encouraged and used. These strategies showed no significant difference between the teacher-encouraged and the student-used strategies, which provided evidence about the important role that language teachers play in students’ learning in general, and in strategy in particular. Furthermore, the majority of participants attributed their frequently-used strategies to their teachers’ practices and advice. Further discussion stresses the potential reasons why pronunciation receives less attention.
Educational Linguistics
Student teaching has been conceptualized as an experience that translates into ample teaching pra... more Student teaching has been conceptualized as an experience that translates into ample teaching practice and meaningful teacher knowledge. Such a conceptualization misses issues that emerge from student teaching as social practice (i.e., the distinctive ways people engage in activities associated with a particular domain of knowledge in a specific social context). Using interview data from a larger qualitative study that investigated pre-service teachers’ learning experiences, I conducted a discourse analysis of Lany’s perspective on her student teaching experience. Unlike other student teachers, Lany perceived the social practices at her placement to be unjust, holding student teaching with contempt and wanting it shortened. Findings indicated an expectations-reality dissonance in student teaching and the reproduction of socially constructed school norms and unequal social relations between school personnel and Lany. These constrained Lany’s abilities to practice teaching and shaped ...
Linguistics and Education, 2018
This study investigates the narratives of Marla, a 25-year old bilingual and biliterate transnati... more This study investigates the narratives of Marla, a 25-year old bilingual and biliterate transnational Latina mother. Data for this study came from an overarching ethnographic narrative inquiry study that investigated how five women tutors in a neighborhood literacy initiative constructed, enacted, and expressed their literacy identities. Marla's narratives illuminated a spatial and temporal framework that warranted a closer, more nuanced look at how she positioned herself in time and space. The authors inquired into what Marla's narratives suggested about her constructions of literacy and identity. Specifically, we focus on Marla's use of deictics, which illuminated a sophisticated storying of self that she used to position herself as a global citizen, a good student, and a mature family woman. Findings highlight how Marla restoried herself, constructing a new "now" self that she actualized in the present as she imagined a new future for her and her family.
The present study investigated the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that En... more The present study investigated the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that English language teachers in Congo encourage students to use, and the strategies that Congolese students actually use to build their vocabulary. Finding out whether the students\u27 most used strategies were teacher-encouraged or independently learned was another point of interest. A Likert-scale of 34 statements and four short-answer questions was designed to collect data. The participants included 20 male and 23 female Congolese learners of English of ages 18 to 22, all of them students in the Arts program at the Reconciliation High School in Brazzaville, Congo. Statistical and content analysis methods were employed. Attention to suffixes was the only strategy that showed a significant difference between the teacher encouraged and student used strategies. Two other strategies, guessing word meanings from context and learning words in collocations approached significance, but the difference between teacher encouragement and student use was not of practical importance. This strong correspondence between the strategies that teachers frequently encourage and students\u27 use provided evidence about the important role that language teachers play in students\u27 learning in general, and in strategy in particular. Quantitative results revealed contextual guessing and dictionary use to be the most frequently used strategies, whereas pronunciation was the least frequently used. Participants\u27 narrative descriptions revealed that notebooks and notepads were frequently used in participants\u27 independent learning of vocabulary. Furthermore, 52.38% (N= 22) of the participants attributed their frequently-used strategies to their teachers\u27 practices and advice while 38.10% (N= 16) claimed that their strategies were independently learned. In view of theory and empirical research, the present study provided evidence that Congolese learners of English are taking responsibilities about their vocabulary learning progress by employing a variety of strategies, some of them acquired as a result of classroom learning, whereas others developed in their independent learning outside of school
International Journal of English Language Education, 2014
This study emphasized the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that English lan... more This study emphasized the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that English language teachers encourage students to use, and the strategies that students actually use to build their vocabulary. Finding out whether the students' most used strategies were teacher-encouraged or independently-learned was another point of interest. The participants included 20 male and 23 female learners of English of ages 18 to 22, all of them students in the Arts program at a Southern Congolese high school. They completed a Likert-scale questionnaire of 34 statements and four short-answer questions. Statistical and content analysis methods were employed. The study revealed contextual guessing and dictionary use to be the most frequently encouraged and used strategies, whereas pronunciation and flashcards were the least frequently encouraged and used. These strategies showed no significant difference between the teacher-encouraged and the student-used strategies, which provided evidence about the important role that language teachers play in students' learning in general, and in strategy in particular. Furthermore, the majority of participants attributed their frequently-used strategies to their teachers' practices and advice. Further discussion stresses the potential reasons why pronunciation receives less attention.
Language and Literacy
Critical literacy is a pedagogy that serves to mediate social justice issues and educate for tran... more Critical literacy is a pedagogy that serves to mediate social justice issues and educate for transformative social action. We present a systematic review of how critical literacy has been incorporated in Canada’s provincial/territorial curriculum documents since the late 1990s and integrated in K-12 classrooms in the last decade. Our analysis shows that critical literacy has been addressed with varying degrees of explicitness in curricula, and there is an imbalance of studies on critical literacies among provinces and territories. We discuss implications and encourage stakeholders in education to explicitly embed critical literacy into curricula and promote critical literacy practices in the classroom.
Journal of International Students
Substantial research emphasizes recruitment and retention of international students over their li... more Substantial research emphasizes recruitment and retention of international students over their lived experiences. This qualitative study employed a sociocultural lens to explore five international graduate students’ lived experiences in the United States and their postgraduation plans. Findings suggest that international graduate students navigate a World that encompasses individual worlds that revolve around challenges, opportunities, and imagined communities. I draw on Gee’s (2014) notion of capitalizing a word normally written in lower case to make clear two differing connotations of the word “world.” I discuss implications for higher education host institutions and their offices of international education.
Journal of Latinos and Education
This article employs counterstorytelling to present a layered, nuanced rendering of two bilingual... more This article employs counterstorytelling to present a layered, nuanced rendering of two bilingual, bicultural Latinas’ school leaving. Data were taken from an ethnographic narrative inquiry into th...
The Handbook of Critical Literacies
This study emphasized the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that English lan... more This study emphasized the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that English language teachers encourage students to use, and the strategies that students actually use to build their vocabulary. Finding out whether the students’ most used strategies were teacher-encouraged or independently-learned was another point of interest. The participants included 20 male and 23 female learners of English of ages 18 to 22, all of them students in the Arts program at a Southern Congolese high school. They completed a Likert-scale questionnaire of 34 statements and four short-answer questions. Statistical and content analysis methods were employed. The study revealed contextual guessing and dictionary use to be the most frequently encouraged and used strategies, whereas pronunciation and flashcards were the least frequently encouraged and used. These strategies showed no significant difference between the teacher-encouraged and the student-used strategies, which provided evidence about the important role that language teachers play in students’ learning in general, and in strategy in particular. Furthermore, the majority of participants attributed their frequently-used strategies to their teachers’ practices and advice. Further discussion stresses the potential reasons why pronunciation receives less attention.