Innovating Pedagogy
Professors are constantly exploring new teaching methods in order to help their students learn more and better. Many of our faculty go one step further, researching teaching and learning practices themselves to help other educators develop more innovative pedagogy. Below is a sample of our work in digital learning and resources, second language learning and teaching, and the interaction between identity and education.
Featured Publications
In the past decades, Spanish Heritage Language (SHL) instruction has become an important component of language education in the US, as shown in the expansion of the field (increasing number of conferences, publications, research projects, professional development opportunities, and engagement with the community). In addition, the field has integrated broader principles and goals for Heritage Language Education (Loza & Beaudrie, 2022; Valdés & Parra, 2018), and advanced novel articulations of learning goals, curriculum implementations, assessments, and materials. The present article proposes the implementation of Open Pedagogies (OP) principles for SHL instruction, a framework that integrates inclusive collaboration with all stakeholders who engage as equal partners in a participatory culture. OP also offers students full ownership of their capabilities as they become empowered to become knowledge analysts, producers, and/or curators (DeRosa & Robinson, 2017; Vañó García, 2023). In this article we showcase how the Texas Coalition for Heritage Spanish (TeCHS) at the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) implements and promotes Open Pedagogies principles to support Heritage Spanish education in the state. This initiative is a tangible enactment of the OP framework, which can inform the next chapter of SHL education in the US.
As an exploration of effective feedback practices in distance learning settings, this study compares instructor feedback using two types of technology media, i.e., screencast video feedback and text-only feedback on Microsoft Word, in a graduate-level online TESOL class, regarding comment categories, student revisions, and perceptions. Results showed that the two feedback types did not result in a statistically significant difference in teacher comments in each comment category, although screencast videos led to more comments on content, whereas Microsoft Word comments targeted more on grammar and language use. Regarding student revisions, students receiving screencast feedback incorporated more teacher feedback into their revisions, and comments made in Microsoft Word files were less addressed than those made in screencast videos. More students indicated preferences towards screencast video feedback for its personal and conversational nature and inclusion of elaborated details. They commented on its usefulness and efficiency in the revision process, and its assistance with their professional development. Screencast video is therefore a promising tool for teachers to create social presence while providing feedback on students' writing in online learning contexts.
Read More: “Screencast Video Feedback in Online TESOL Classes”
Using a multiple-case study approach, this research study examined how the students (pre/in-service teachers) addressed the same linguistic topic but created three distinctive multimodal products across digital genres in a multimodal composing project. Drawing on New London Group’s (2000) pedagogy of multiliteracies, we specifically examined how the students individualized choices and interpretations of a multimodal task, and how they orchestrated multimodal resources (e.g., linguistic, visual, and spatial) to represent their linguistic knowledge, construct meaning, and address potential audience in multimodal composing. The three illustrative cases show the students' unique approaches to engaging in the digital multimodal task on “word formation” through digital storytelling, digital poster, and gamification-based presentation. This paper concludes with pedagogical implications on incorporating digital multimodal composing tasks in the teacher education curriculum.
Despite the increasing incorporation of multimodal practices into ESL/EFL classes, research on multimodal pedagogy in TESOL teacher education is still in its infancy. Empirical evidence also shows that ESL/EFL teachers lack skills to design and deliver multimodal practices. To bridge the research gap and innovate the TESOL curriculum, the author in this study implemented multimodal projects in two online graduate courses, and examined the students' (pre-/in-service teachers') perceptions on integration of multimodal projects. The analyses of semi-structured interviews and written narratives, supplemented with the multimodal products, revealed that the multimodal practices facilitated the students' learning of content knowledge and their professional development. The perceived benefits included engaging and motivating content learning, retaining and deepening knowledge, fostering mutual learning in online community, enhancing digital learning, and fostering motivation to implement multimodal pedagogy. The students also conveyed challenges in topic selection, technology use, and time control, and provided suggestions on peer interaction, technology training, and task management. This study has significant implications for research and pedagogy in TESOL teacher education.
Read More: “Multimodal Pedagogy in TESOL Teacher Education: Students’ Perspectives”
This book presents a comprehensive approach to issues related to researching and teaching second language (L2) writing in digital environments. In the digital age, new technologies have revolutionized the ways we communicate and construct knowledge, and have also reshaped the traditional notions of writing and literacy, posing new challenges and opportunities for L2 teachers and students. This book provides up-to-date coverage of the main areas of L2 writing and technology, including digital multimodal composing, computer-mediated collaborative writing, online teacher and peer feedback, automated writing evaluation, and corpus-based writing instruction. It synthesizes the relevant literature, analyzes theoretical perspectives, compiles relevant resources, and offers research and pedagogical recommendations to guide scholars in undertaking new L2 writing research and instructional practice in technologically-supported educational contexts. This book will be of relevance and interest to researchers, language teachers, and graduate students in applied linguistics and education.
Read More: “Researching and Teaching Second Language Writing in the Digital Age”
Digital multimodal composing (DMC) has attracted language instructors' and researchers' increasing attention during recent years. Previous studies mainly investigated the students' DMC processes and perceptions, but DMC products are underexamined, and in particular, scarce is research comparing collaborative DMC products and individual DMC products. This article reports an empirical study conducted with 185 EFL college students in an English for specific purposes (ESP) course in Vietnam, in which they completed two infographic tasks using Visme, one collaboratively and the other individually. The DMC products were graded according to a rubric assessing the aspects of content/organization, multimedia/visual effects, and language use; the accuracy of the students' infographics was also evaluated. The results of variance (MANOVA) test showed no statistically significant difference in the overall qualities of infographics between the two work conditions (i.e. collaborative composing and individual composing) as to both tasks, but the between-participant effects showed that collaborative DMC products were advantageous in visual effects for Task 1 and in content/organization for Task 2. The findings of the Welch's t-test revealed no statistically significant difference in the accuracy of students' DMC products between collaborative work and individual work. This study fills the research gap by comparing the qualities of collaborative DMC products and individual DMC products, and meanwhile highlights the role of infographics in writing pedagogy. Implications of the study for research and pedagogy are also discussed.
Research on second language (L2) collaborative writing (CW) has proliferated over the recent decade and will continue to bloom due to the changing landscape of writing and learning in the digital age. This article provides a research agenda on CW in L2 classrooms. We illustrate six research themes for future research inquiry by pointing out the research gap, following a brief review of theoretical frameworks and existing empirical efforts on CW. We then expound on six specific research tasks that we deem to be pressing for this domain to progress, including more attention to multimodal CW, expanded frameworks for analyzing peer interaction and writing products, deployment of underused research techniques and improved research practice, development of CW assessment practice, as well as the inquiry of practitioners' input on CW. We hope to provide guidance for future research endeavors by identifying avenues of investigations on CW and meanwhile contribute to the trajectory of vibrant research on L2 writing and language learning.
Read More: “Collaborative Writing in L2 Classrooms: A Research Agenda”
Kaleidoscope: Shaping Language, Shaping Identity focuses on “academic discourse,” the kind of thinking, reading, and writing expected at university. Intended to speak directly to inexperienced and underprepared student writers, this text introduces students to a number of genres that are typical at college or university with emphasis on creating thoughtful, purposeful, independent writers. By introducing practical application of modern composition theory, students learn how writing is shaped by the rhetorical situation, discursive practices, and genre expectations and how they, as writers, have a voice that will shape future discourse. Instructors of first-year composition can use the textbook to engage inexperienced writers and motivate them to embrace writing. “Starred Thoughts” are peppered throughout the textbooks with encouragement, insider-information, and further explanation about the “why” writers write the ways they do at university. Students begin their journey with a mini-Memoir and progress through more nuanced and “academic” writing (i.e., Reviews, Rhetorical Analysis, Literary Analysis, Visual Analysis) and end with the Argument-Synthesis that brings together academic research, visual and literary analysis, and argument. Students are provided with activities that engage them in a writing process, research methods that are defined by the genre and authorial purpose, and a number of tools that will help them discover their best practices for writing in each genre. Students are provided a list and explanation of the expected characteristics for each genre under study, an explanation of how to write their own essay, peer-review guiding questions, and reflective writing journals.
Read More: “Kaleidoscope: Shaping Language, Shaping Identity”
In this chapter, Woo examines the impactful power of teaching about linguistic justice at Edward Waters University in Florida.
Read More: “Practicing Black Linguistic Justice at an HBCU under the Age of Stop W.O.K.E. Act”
This article examines the implications of incorporating Korean pop music (K-pop) within a first-year composition course at Edward Waters University, a historically black college or university (HBCU). Using this interracial teaching environment as a case study, I share the challenges and difficulties I experienced as a composition teacher in my attempt to teach transcultural and interracial discourse in an HBCU writing course. It narrates how students in my class conceptualize and understand non-United States global-culturalism and ethnic formation in their writing practices. Given that Black is the majority race group at Edward Waters University, I observed how my students responded to K-pop amid the recent social environment of the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent Asian hate discourse in the U.S. I designed a composition class representing K-pop as an interracial, hybrid space, especially through its historic, strong connection to Black culture to encourage students to reflect on the value of interracial solidarity through cultural exchange. Specifically, this article describes a visual-narrative analysis assignment I designed that asks students to watch music videos of K-pop groups, BLACKPINK's “How You Like That” (2020) and BTS's “Dynamite” (2020), on YouTube and analyze the influence of Black culture in the videos. After performing this work, the students in their essays critically compared and contrasted different racial settings and cultural adaptations between Black American and South Korean cultures in K-pop and navigated the possibility of Afro-Asian Solidarity through cultural exchange. This essay ultimately argues that the transnational pedagogy of critical race theory within an HBCU composition course can nourish the creation of alternative languages of racial discourse between Blacks and Asians beyond the dichotomy of the existing racial hierarchy.
Read More: “Teaching K-pop at an HBCU: The Possibility of Afro-Asian Solidarity”
Fueled by a keen awareness of the affordances of technology and the predominance of the communicative approach, computer-mediated collaborative writing (CMCW) has gained fast-growing interest in second language (L2) contexts. To illuminate research foci and guide future research efforts in this burgeoning area, the current study provided a substantive and methodological review of 113 primary studies on CMCW in L2 contexts, covering qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research. Each study was coded for substantive features, including research context, study setup, components analyzed, and the analytic frameworks. We also coded the sample for methodological practices that were applicable to all research (e.g., instrument development, reliability estimates) and those related to a specific research orientation (e.g., use of statistical analyses, validity strategies). The results indicated (a) a strong preference for meaning-focused writing tasks covering various genres, (b) considerable heterogeneity in the metrics for measuring texts, (c) limited interests in L2 learners' attention to form. While there was a strength in reporting certain strategies for enhancing research validity, the results revealed methodological concerns such as insufficient reporting of learner/context information, reliability estimates, effect sizes, and exact p values. Based upon the findings, we provided a number of empirically grounded suggestions for future research.
Read More: “Computer-Mediated Collaborative Writing in L2 Classrooms: A Systematic Review”
