Are They Ready to Participate? East Asian Students’ Acquisition of Verbal Participation in American Classrooms (original) (raw)
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2010
This study investigates seven East Asian graduate students' acquisition of verbal participation competence in American classrooms. By examining the acquisition process, the study focuses on the factors that deactivate participants' intents to participate, the strategies they develop to realize these intents, and the moments that signal readiness to participate. Participants' struggles, strategies, and moments at which they participated were analyzed at four phases over a two-year period through semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and participant observations. Cross-and single-case analyses of the data were conducted, and a complex mix of affective, cognitive and situational factors was identified. The analysis suggests that participants are challenged more by cognitive factors than by cultural factors in the acquisition process. Metacognitive and sociocultural strategies work interactively and shape effective access to full participation membership. A case is made for language teaching to treat cultural conventions of participation from an acquisitional perspective.
2020
First of all, I am grateful to all of the professors who let me video-record their classes-Linda Wine, Nancy Boblett, and Howard Williams-and all of their students who consented to being in this study. I particularly wish to thank Howard Williams for his genuine kindness in inviting me to his class to record his sessions at the last minute, when I desperately needed more NESS data. Through watching and transcribing the footage and listening to the lectures from his course, I had the added bonus of re-learning what pragmatic key elements, such as "relevance" and "implicature," were all about. This project would not have been completed without the direction of my sponsor and advisor, Hansun Zhang Waring, who provided me with not only her precise feedback and advice, but also her deep compassion and constant encouragement to move forward. I am eternally grateful, as I learned the significance of passion and patience as a teacher, and work ethic and true scholarship as a researcher, throughout our work together. I am also immensely thankful to the rest of my dissertation committee members: Sarah Creider, for being both my mentor and a role model who once was in the same doctoral seminar; and Barbara Bashaw, from Dance Education, who took the time to read my dissertation and offered her very interesting, constructive comments. My thanks also go to Leslie Beebe, whose lectures about pragmatics and discourse analysis in my early years at Teachers College were so fascinating that I decided to pursue this path all the way. Further, I very much appreciate the sharing of data analysis, mutual feedback, and encouragement with my fellow doctoral students and colleagues in the Language Use seminar, who served as a very strong support system for me: Allie King, Gahye Song, vi
Steps Towards Improve Participation
Steps towards improved participation? An analysis of classroom talk and the "ladder of interaction" in the Japanese context AdissertationbyTimMarchand March2010 submittedinpartialcompletionoftheMScdegreeinTeachingEnglishtoSpeakersofOtherLanguages Abstract
Rethinking Classroom Participation
Teaching Innovation Projects, 2012
Within the classroom, feelings of alienation can adversely affect students' ability to speak, and thus serve to reproduce social inequities. This is especially the case with some first year students who may not have had many opportunities to speak, as well as students from different cultures where talking in class may not be the norm. To help mitigate power imbalances, it is necessary to develop a diversity of teaching practices and approaches to learning to ensure that each student feels that her class participation counts. In this workshop, I want to consider ways in which it is possible to encourage participation by incorporating verbalization and vocalization techniques into the classroom.
Why do many students appear reluctant to participate in classroom learning discourse?
System, 1997
Teachers sometimes comment on East Asian students' reluctance to adopt active speech roles in classrooms. In two large-scale surveys conducted at the University of Hong Kong, however, students gave no evidence of such reluctance. They expressed a liking for communicative work at school and a preference for university classes in which students do most of the talking. What is the cause, then, of the reticence that some teachers have observed? The surveys indicate that most students have enjoyed inadequate speaking opportunities at school, where "listening to teacher" has been their most frequent classroom experience. Many have low confidence in their ability to speak without prior planning. Although most see no conflict between speaking English and their Chinese identity, many feel unease when speaking it. This unease is often reinforced by students' anxiety to speak well and some teachers' error treatment techniques. Schoolteachers need to provide more and better contexts for students to develop oral English skills and use these skills in active learning roles in the classroom. Tertiary teachers need to develop strategies for encouraging students to step into the active learning roles which both sides seem to want. These practical implications will be explored further in the paper.
Drawing from the theory of planned behavior, we conducted a belief elicitation study to gain insights on what considerations guide Chinese English-as-foreign-language students' decision to participate in English during class. We used four semistructured focus groups (in Chinese) to explore salient beliefs from a total of 34 Chinese university students enrolled in a Sino-American international branch campus. Results suggest that participants considered attentive listening as an integral part of their decisions about classroom participation, probably given their precollege education experience. They also perceived participation to be an effective means to improve English skills and to acquire a Western mindset, but also a frustrating practice that can waste class time and generate anxiety. Finally, through verbal and nonverbal communication, both instructors and classmates played a crucial role in affecting these students' intention to participate in English during class. Ultimately, we discuss practical pedagogical implications as well as relevant theoretical implications.
Quiet, but only in class: Reviewing the in-class participation of Asian students
Retrieved on December, 2005
This paper presents a teaching innovation that has proved successful in stimulating the in-class participation of Asian students. The innovation consists of using written communication as an additional tool to clarify material and to promote discussions. Although this innovation has been introduced in too few classes to draw a general conclusion, its results suggest that Asian students are willing to actively participate to discussions. Teachers can therefore unlock their Asian students' potential to speak up. These observations are in line with the literature, suggesting that the quiet behaviour of Asian students is related to cultural elements (including language skills) rather than a specific approach to learning. They are also consistent with the insights arising from a large student survey carried out at the National University of Singapore.