This past week has been quite a productive one, especially compared to the last 6 weeks of relatively little productivity. Firstly, I now have two co-chairs for my dissertation committee: my advisor who is essential in the area of teacher education and another professor in my department who is essential in the area of ESL education specifically. After meeting with the former, I have been advised to revise Chapter 1 of my research proposal to make a stronger argument for intercultural communication training of language educators.
Within the past few days, I have engaged this advice in three different ways. The first was reviewing the literature I had already collected and seeing how I could reorganize my writing to make a stronger argument. For me, this is the easiest to plan and most difficult to write. The second was doing some online research of programs that recruit people to teach English (or other languages) abroad and seeking out any evidence of intercultural or cross-cultural training. With the list I have compiled so far, I would say that I am familiar with about half of the programs. The third was starting another search for scholarly articles and books that specifically address the benefits and disadvantages of intercultural communication training in education and elsewhere (usually in multinational corporations).
The last two approaches to this challenge have given me many new ideas, some of which are distracting in that they suggest a complete change in Chapter 3 of my research proposal. The most interesting yet distracting idea was to investigate the intercultural or cross-cultural training programs within these international teacher recruiters. For example, the JET Program in Japan, EPIK in South Korea, and the Peace Corps in the United States require some cultural training before their English teachers start teaching. I would like to know how they developed these programs, how they are evaluated, and how a random sample of teachers in these programs found them useful, useless, or something in between. I only think of this as distracting because the more I think about a theoretical framework about this type of research, the further I move away from my original proposal. This is a symptom of analysis paralysis, I believe. And I do not want to get snared in that net.
So far, I have collected about 10 articles with only a few published over a decade ago and 1 textbook. The best discovery so far is that I found another expert in the area, Karen E. Johnson from Penn State. I have heard of her before, and I look forward to reading her articles and the textbook she co-edited. Our interests overlap in the recognizing the importance of developing language teachers' sociocultural knowledge. I should be able to elaborate more on this as I read her work. On a side note, I remember one of my supervisors in Korea who had all of us sojourning teacher trainers read one of her articles.
I feel that I am on a roll in that the more recent studies have indicated that this area, intercultural competence or sociocultural knowledge of ESL teachers, is a hot research area. I am temporarily stepping aside from another hot area, the English language policies of Japan. And I am beginning to see a connection to this current research interest to another interest I have in multiliteracies, which suggests that today's classrooms have more diversity in terms of student backgrounds in terms of cultural and technological literacies. But I digress.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Data Collection Options
I'm still in the research proposal phase and am facing some options for collecting data. I will list them here and hopefully they will help me (and maybe my committee) to help decide which path is the best to choose.
Option #1 - The Idealistic Path
I most likely will not choose this path, but for the sake of completeness and continuity, I'd like to share my original idea for data collection. I would travel abroad to either Japan or South Korea for 6-12 months to collect data on a group of individuals or on an already established community of EFL teachers that has formed. This would be either a multiple case study or an ethnography. Data collection would consist of interviews, participant-observation, and document analysis.
Option #2 - The First Stages of Adjustment
For my research proposal assignment, I proposed interviewing EFL instructors who had just arrived to Japan for the first time. Through my contacts in Japan, I would interview between 3 and 15 new sojourners with my theoretical framework based on cross-cultural adjustment, mainly from the field of psychology. I would interview each participant at least twice and ideally three times in stages within a 6 month period for a multiple case study. This study would be limited to Japan only.
Option #3 - Before and After Arriving to a New Country
Keeping the same theoretical framework as option #2, I would interview the same number of participants in the United States with weeks or a few months before they travel to teach EFL abroad. Because of my literature review, I would like to isolate the countries to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. I would interview each participant once before he or she leaves and once or twice after he or she arrives. The endpoint would be no longer than 3 months after their arrival, thus making this study a few months shorter than option #2 and it may be easier to find participants through the University of Iowa and perhaps my other alma mater.
Option #4 - Before, During, and After Sojourning
This option was raised by my advisor, but we hadn't much time to discuss in detail, so I may be misrepresenting her ideas. This is mainly my interpretation of how I see it. In this case, I would not follow my participants through a process as in the first 3 options. Instead they would represent a certain stage of sojourning. Like option 3, I can interview a few people before they teach abroad. Like options 1 & 2, I can interview a few who are currently teaching abroad. And a new option is to interview someone who has returned from teaching abroad. I would need a new theoretical framework for this, and my advisor and I have some ideas.
Option #5 - Interviews and Blogs
Many sojourning EFL teachers have written or are writing blogs about their experiences and beliefs about teaching abroad. I am strongly interested in investigating these blogs, but I would like to triangulate the data with some interviews from participants similar to the ones in option #4. I have already started collecting literature on collecting data from blogs for qualitative research.
Option #6 - Community of Sojourning EFL Teachers Online?
This idea is the furthest removed from my original idea, but I am equally interested in it. It involves the same target population, but they no longer need to be new to the country. This study would instead investigate the extent to which a community of sojourning EFL teachers exists online. I would start with locating web sites for these hypothetical communities and then join them (like in a netnography) or email/interview them about the structure, benefits, and caveats of the community online.
Summary
Option #1 - The Idealistic Path
I most likely will not choose this path, but for the sake of completeness and continuity, I'd like to share my original idea for data collection. I would travel abroad to either Japan or South Korea for 6-12 months to collect data on a group of individuals or on an already established community of EFL teachers that has formed. This would be either a multiple case study or an ethnography. Data collection would consist of interviews, participant-observation, and document analysis.
Option #2 - The First Stages of Adjustment
For my research proposal assignment, I proposed interviewing EFL instructors who had just arrived to Japan for the first time. Through my contacts in Japan, I would interview between 3 and 15 new sojourners with my theoretical framework based on cross-cultural adjustment, mainly from the field of psychology. I would interview each participant at least twice and ideally three times in stages within a 6 month period for a multiple case study. This study would be limited to Japan only.
Option #3 - Before and After Arriving to a New Country
Keeping the same theoretical framework as option #2, I would interview the same number of participants in the United States with weeks or a few months before they travel to teach EFL abroad. Because of my literature review, I would like to isolate the countries to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. I would interview each participant once before he or she leaves and once or twice after he or she arrives. The endpoint would be no longer than 3 months after their arrival, thus making this study a few months shorter than option #2 and it may be easier to find participants through the University of Iowa and perhaps my other alma mater.
Option #4 - Before, During, and After Sojourning
This option was raised by my advisor, but we hadn't much time to discuss in detail, so I may be misrepresenting her ideas. This is mainly my interpretation of how I see it. In this case, I would not follow my participants through a process as in the first 3 options. Instead they would represent a certain stage of sojourning. Like option 3, I can interview a few people before they teach abroad. Like options 1 & 2, I can interview a few who are currently teaching abroad. And a new option is to interview someone who has returned from teaching abroad. I would need a new theoretical framework for this, and my advisor and I have some ideas.
Option #5 - Interviews and Blogs
Many sojourning EFL teachers have written or are writing blogs about their experiences and beliefs about teaching abroad. I am strongly interested in investigating these blogs, but I would like to triangulate the data with some interviews from participants similar to the ones in option #4. I have already started collecting literature on collecting data from blogs for qualitative research.
Option #6 - Community of Sojourning EFL Teachers Online?
This idea is the furthest removed from my original idea, but I am equally interested in it. It involves the same target population, but they no longer need to be new to the country. This study would instead investigate the extent to which a community of sojourning EFL teachers exists online. I would start with locating web sites for these hypothetical communities and then join them (like in a netnography) or email/interview them about the structure, benefits, and caveats of the community online.
Summary
- Target Participants - sojourning EFL instructors; the original plan was on those new to a certain country, but I do not need to focus on them exclusively; I'm not sure how important it is that they all come from the same country for some of these options
- Theoretical Framework - initially it was in cross-cultural adjustment theory and Holliday's host culture complex (1994); I would like to the use the latter more than the former as it focuses on EFL education more; ideally I'd like to use a theory that deals with the sociocultural nature of teaching EFL abroad
- Target Site - in the strictest sense, I have the most literature and experience with Japan; in the loosest sense, it could be in any country where English is not the dominant or official language; in a stricter sense, I would like to focus on East Asia based on my literature and experience
- Method - qualitative with emphasis on interviews or blog document analysis or combination of both, with some participant-observation possible
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