Past Event

Bring your lunch and come hear about SLaLS graduate research

Making it theirs: The case of portfolio use by teachers in a tutorial setting
Stephanie Mauk, MA Student

While portfolios can help connect teachers and students to the processes and productsof learning and assessment (Blake, Backman, Frys, Holber, Ivan, & Sellitto, 1995), many portfolio-based assessment methods are abandoned soon after their implementation due to, among other reasons, insufficient training and curriculum support for teachers.  The benefits of portfolios in educational settings are derived from their effective use and implementation, as well as the tasks and performances that they are used with (Fox, 2014). In this case study, four tutors from the Gemstone Learning tutorial company are participating in on-going training and professional development sessions, which are catered to their specific use and implementation of portfolios in their tutorial lessons.  Drawing from questionnaire responsesand semi-structured interviews, qualitative analysis of the data will be used to make analytic generalizations about future portfolio training and implementation methods.  In turn, this study may provide useful information regarding future portfolio implementation and use in educational settings.

Pragmatic functions of formulaic sequences: What are they and how do we teach them to L2 learners?
Alisa Zavialova, MA Student

Despite the sufficient body of existing research on teaching pragmatics and formulaic language sequences (House, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig, 2009), there are only a few studies that investigate effectiveness of explicit instruction not only for awareness-raising purposes, but also for the sake of stimulating retention in students’ active lexicon (Peters, 2009; Webb & Kagimoto, 2011). This project aims to address this real-world problem. Responses will be elicited from native speakers of English (through written discourse completion task) and from ESL students (through oral role-play discourse completion task during pre- and post-tests).  All tasks will be based on nine real-life scenarios that usually require the use of formulaic sequences and are commonly referred to as conventional expressions (Bardovi-Harlig, Rose, & Nickels, 2008). L2 learners will then be split into control and treatment groups, where the latter will be exposed to explicit instruction sessions (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2012). During the delayed post-test both groups will be asked to participate in a similar role-play again in order to compare the performance of the two groups. The findings may support the effectiveness of explicit instruction for developing second language pragmatic competence.