Pilot Study Developments

Over 2 weeks into it, and I have found some promising results from my pilot study.  The online data have shown me that I could probably collect about 2/3 of my data online and the remaining 1/3 through interviews.  At this point, I would say I'm halfway through collecting my pilot data.  I'm also about a third of the way through revising Chapter 3, although I haven't touched Chapter 1 yet.

About chapter 1, I'm trying to find the best way to collect total population estimates.  My primary route has failed, and I'm currently getting ideas from my secondary route.  At this point, I have two options that I can use at the same time, and that is to collect data from an online survey and from national affiliates of one international organization of my field, TESOL.  I probably should consider the other one, IATEFL.

My next step is to finish collecting the pilot data by the end of September.  The bulk of my rewriting Chapter 3 deals with providing my understanding of online research and how it applies to my study.  Once I pass that hurdle, it should only take me a day or two to finish that chapter.  I'll slowly plod through Chapter 1, especially when I'm not getting the (expected) big numbers yet.  All in all, I seem to be following through with my projected timeline very well.

Pilot Study

This past week, I had a very constructive meeting with my co-chairs in that we discussed changes to be made in my first chapter of my dissertation and plans to tackle chapter 3, which center around conducting a pilot study.

Now I conducted a preliminary pilot study last summer while I was teaching English in Japan.  Most of that data was informative in how to approach interviews for my dissertation.  However, I have decided to collect data from online data and use the interviews to support and triangulate the online data.  I took an ethnography class last year with one assignment about analyzing online data, so that has prepared me a little bit.  For my pilot study, I will be able to apply those skills to my research questions and theoretical models.

I have given myself a deadline six weeks from the meeting, October 17, to have the following items completed: 1) pilot study, 2) a rewrite of chapter 3, and 3) another edit of chapter 1.  In addition to this, I will be reorganizing and developing chapter 2.  If I am able to stick to this schedule, I will ask my co-chairs for another meeting around the time of the deadline to discuss officially proposing my research to my committee.

Since this Wednesday, I have spent half of Thursday seeking out various online sources to collect my data.  One of these sources will be chosen for my pilot study.  I gave myself Friday the day off, except for job applications.  And today has been solely dedicated to my assistantship and anthropology seminar.  I plan to dedicate all of Monday to getting the pilot study off the ground.  IRB is not needed in that I will not publish the data from the one online source.  The data will only be used to help find the best theoretical framework to answer my research questions and fit my model.

Once the pilot study is underway, I will dedicate at least Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to working on and completing the three items described two paragraphs ago.  Tuesdays and Thursdays will be dedicated to my assistantship and anthropology seminar, and the weekends to my job applications.

Since the second week of this semester, I feel as if I've been working 60+ hours a week.  And I only feel overworked or wiped out about 2 days per week, so I call that a good sign.

Getting Back in High Gear

During the past 3 weeks, I have experienced a hiatus from my dissertation based on poor planning and bad luck.  The poor planning consisted of not bringing two important texts with me while visiting my in-laws.  I incorrectly thought that I would be too busy to be distracted by my dissertation.  Although this was true for the first 5 days, it wasn't so for the remaining 9, so I stewed in regret for a while. 

This regret was replaced by the misfortune of my laptop computer dying on me.  Fortunately for me, all my dissertation work was backed up on a flash drive and in the cloud.  If I were religious, I would say it was a god's way of telling me not to work on my dissertation during these past 3 weeks.  This god was not too far off from my advisor's message to take a little break.  I did not know she possessed magic powers.

My family summer vacations ended this past weekend, and suddenly I was thrust into scheduling meetings.  These meetings signify my workload for this semester.  My most urgent meetings are in regard to my new graduate assistantship.  I can't say too much more about this since I haven't attended the first meeting yet.  However, it is a half-time assistantship, which is 20 hours a week, and I plan on spending 10 of those 20 hours in the new office, wherever that is.

I am also scheduling meetings to discuss my research proposal with my co-chairs.  I've received from great feedback already, but I'm waiting for some more before I start planning my revisions and outlines for later chapters.  I have 6 credit hours dedicated to my dissertation, which is the equivalent to 2 courses.  At this point, I have no idea how this will work, but I'd like to envision 3 credit hours on writing and revising the research proposal, and the other 3 credit hours on the research proposal committee meeting(s) and the IRB application.

Other meetings are in regard to my future employment, which can start as early as May 2013.  My funding at the College of Education expires as late as August 2013, and full-time positions for the next academic year have already been posted.  At this point, all these jobs are either full-time tenure-track professor positions or they are program director/administrator positions at university ESL programs.  I will be meeting with several people to discuss my job application strategies since I have never applied to jobs of that caliber before.  It can be a bit intimidating.

Lastly, I am taking only one class this semester.  This class is taught by one of my dissertation committee members and satisfies the last requirement for my cognate area.  This class appears to help strengthen my position of the need for some sociocultural anthropology in second language teacher education.  More on this later, perhaps.

So to sum up what this semester seems to look like:

• An average of 20 hours/week dedicated to my graduate assistantship
• 6 credit hours dedicated to my dissertation
• 3 credit hours of my sociocultural anthropology seminar
• Job search and applications (which many people consider a full-time job)

I'm excited about all four, but the excitement for each is very different.  I'm sure that this blog will demonstrate these differences and the changes among them throughout the semester.

How I Spent My Summer

Although summer is not over yet, it seems that meetings with members of my (future) dissertation committee are until the fall semester begins.  This leaves me about a month to polish up Chapter 1 and to structure Chapter 2 of my proposal.  I can also spend the time reading more in my research area, which was being discouraged earlier this summer since the readings can detract me.  So what have I done?

1) I now have 2 co-chairs on my dissertation committee, one being my advisor, who is an expert in teacher education.  The other is a professor, who is an expert in my field of ESL education.  My research area draws from literature in ESL teacher education, and I hope my research can help improve it.

2) I have written 3 drafts of Chapter 1 and have submitted the third draft to my co-chairs.  It is unfinished in that I am uncertain of the delimitations as the research methodology may change.

3) I have come across 2 influential researchers in my readings, and have contacted one of them.  Both have published numerous articles within the last decade that promote my position.

4) I have collected a substantial amount of literature and read through a handful or so of the ones that seemed important enough to include in my Chapter 1.  After reading them, I would estimate that half of what I read was indeed useful.

5) Next week, I will finish up my graduate assistantship with the Education Technology Center, where I worked for the past 3 years.

6) I have formally invited a third member to my dissertation committee.

To me, this list doesn't seem like a lot.  Of the last ten weeks, I would say I have spent a total of 5-7 days writing and about twice as many days reading.  Half of that reading was influential in my establishing my position.  Perhaps I'm being unfair in that I just completed the busiest semester in my life, so anything following that would feel relatively free.  In fact, I'm not getting credit for doing this work.  I'm doing this work to get this dissertation done.

Perhaps I had high expectations for the summer.  By this time, I had hoped to be done rewriting both Chapters 1 and 2, so I only met my expectations halfway there.  I also wanted to make some progress on my IRB application, and this did not happen at all.

I am pushing myself because my ultimate goal for the next academic year is to be completed with data collection.  After next May, I will have no more financial support from the College of Education, so I will have to find a job somewhere.  Right now, I have the luxury of putting my dissertation at the top of my list of priorities.  Soon that will give way to trying to secure a job and trying to sell our house, both of which will intensify as the academic year comes to a close.

With a month left before the academic year begins, I plan to spend about 2 weeks at my in-laws' in Maryland.  That gives me a week before the trip and a week after the trip to dedicate most attention to my research proposal.  But like I mentioned earlier, there is little reading and writing to do.
I hope to invite a fourth member to my dissertation committee before the semester begins.


Perhaps what adds to the frustration of the summer was the sequence of job rejections, although none of those jobs were vitally important to my way of life.  Two of these job rejections were for summer employment, one paying 10 times as much as I am making at this assistantship.  The third was for a job starting in the fall, but I had lost interest in it before they rejected me.  Although I could take or leave any of those jobs, rejection still hurts my confidence.

Aside from my research and jobs, I was able to enjoy plenty of time with my family with some excursions around the area.  I also had plenty of time to read books that are not related to ESL education at all, and I had time to update my professional website/portfolio.  But, from time to time, I have experienced boredom, which I had not had to deal with for the past 6 years, and that has unsettled me.

Chapter 1

I initially wrote the first chapter of my research proposal/dissertation in February this year.  Of the three chapters that I wrote, it was the most difficult because I had no idea who my audience was.  In reality, the audience was my professor in the research proposal writing class and my classmates.  However, none of them are members of my dissertation committee, who I tried to imagine as my audience.  The problem with that was I could not really consult them yet because I had not completed my comprehensive exams yet.  So it felt like I was writing Chapter 1 for a simulated audience, one that doesn't really exist. 

Chapter 1 should be the most engaging of the chapters to write because it is my opportunity to make my case.  Because I didn't know who I'm making my case to, I struggled.  Although I tried to imagine my future dissertation committee as my audience, I also had to write it for someone outside the field.  In fact, I do have someone outside the field sitting on my committee, but she is very familiar with the context of my initially proposed data collection.  I felt like I was making my case to people who were already half on board with me.  I didn't feel the need to make a stronger case, and perhaps that is what made my first chapter 1 weak.

Now that I have passed my comprehensive exams, my advisor and co-chair recommended that my audience be to someone in education, but not in foreign language or ESL education, and to someone who has the authority of issuing grant money.  This advice has helped tremendously, but I basically had to scrap most of the original draft.  I had to scrap it because I have decided, through the advice of several committee members, that I should broaden my scope beyond sojourning EFL teachers in Japan to EFL teachers in East Asia sojourning from the United States (and maybe Canada?).  My advisor also recommended that framing chapter 1 as a call for intercultural communication training in ESL education would help.

The first steps were the easiest as I already had most of the literature.  I made a spreadsheet and categorized my literature in terms of domain: education, language education, teacher education, intercultural communication, and sojourner studies.  After I completed this spreadsheet, I revisited all the literature that stressed both teacher education and intercultural communication to find the best arguments.  Then I looked at literature about intercultural communication to better sell the idea as the business/corporate world finds intercultural communication to be quite important. 

Actually...writing this blog is helping because I haven't made my point clear enough about the connection between the international business/corporate need for intercultural communication and the reason why many people learn English as an international language.  Put simply: globalization.  I've heard this pitch so many times that I forget that not everybody knows this connection.  I wonder if I should make that my biggest catch rather than the poor standards for teachers in terms of intercultural communication.  It seems as if it precludes the standards.

Anyway, although I seemed to have avoided analysis paralysis when writing chapter 1 for class.  I now seem to be going into it a bit.  I seem to have about 2 good hours of progress a day before I get second thoughts that send me into this analysis paralysis.  The simplest example is when I realize that many of my studies for demographics are over a decade old.  So when I search for more up to date demographic information, I find little to none, but that search helps me find other literature that may help.  But I already have enough convincing literature.  This sidestepping literature search usually takes up an hour, and then I lose track and second guess my arguments, primarily, and my writing ability, secondarily. 

This blog is helping me refocus in terms of bullet points.  I seem to have a few bullet point-type ideas, but I feel the urge to elaborate on them even though that's the point of chapter 2.  I believe my biggest struggle is when to elaborate and when to keep it succinct.  This struggle comes out of explaining my ideas to someone who is not in my field.  How much explanation or background information should this person need, so it is clear enough? 

So I will revisit my literature and make more bullet points to sell the need for my study under the premise that it will improve intercultural communication training in second language teacher education.  It's back to outlining, but without scrapping again.

Intercultural Communication Training

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.

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

• 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