Sessions

Determining Text-Specific Comments in L2 Peer Response

In second language (L2) peer response discourse literature, there appears little research on defining specificity in commentary. This case study examines peer response activities for essay assignments in a Korean university’s English writing course. The data comprises asynchronous peer response commentary and revision attempts for final drafts. The coding scheme employs Liu and Sadler’s (2003) codes for area, nature, and type commentary, and then adds a specificity dimension to account for specific and generic features. Results indicate that students employed various noteworthy text features – including but not limited to hedging techniques, vague expressivity, and faux specificity – when constructing commentary. Revision ideas were more often accepted for surface-level or generic-dimension commentary, suggesting simplified concepts were more impressive to essay writers. The results provide useful implications for how to model response in ways that encourage specific or generic idea construction.

Instructors' Perspectives on Korean Students' Ideologies of English

When it comes to Korean ideologies of English language and culture, Park (2009) theorizes three distinct practices: necessitation of English in terms of social status and mobility, externalization of English as an Other that conflicts with Korean identity, and self-deprecation of one’s own progress and achievements as English speakers. However, limited evidence exists in the literature to support these theories, and some populations such as university English instructors have seldom been investigated. This study will present survey and interview data from instructors of English in Korea for gauging their thoughts on the three aforementioned ideologies, including how instructors derive their own conclusions and how they observe students exhibiting such characteristics. Survey data was collected in Spring 2020 with reflective interviews conducted in Summer 2020, meaning answers might be contextualized by COVID-19 circumstances. For a few instructors, anonymous surveys gauging students’ perceptions were also gathered and compared to their instructors’ responses.

Designing an Intensive Reading Lesson

If extensive reading is easy or pleasure reading, intensive reading may be the opposite: the teacher selects slightly more challenging texts, and readers practice target skills and strategies when approaching the text. In many classrooms, the qualities of intensive reading may be more common than those of extensive reading, but how sure can we be that students are reading intensively? In this workshop, we’ll approach the defining goals and traits of intensive reading, including the common reading stages (before, during and after reading), lesson design considerations, and digital tools that could help teachers and students alike. As not all reading class contexts are the same, we may also discuss how elements of the intensive reading process can be adapted to the audience’s teaching context.