Hello. Thank you for visiting my website.
I am a teacher in the Tokyo and Kanagawa area. I am interested in how we teach English, especially how we teach listening and pronunciation. If you are interested in working with me, contact me.
New article: The linguistic landscape of restaurant menus
I wrote an article with some of my students based on work we do in the first semester of their first year on linguistic landscapes. This work is to get students thinking about language and its use in context and the cultural variables that interact with the linguistic items to create meaning. It’s actually more interesting than it sounds, for me anyway.
This work was conducted under semi-quarantine so the information was gathered from the internet. However, I still think it stands well as a way for students to get used to research projects, and to think about how and what the language means and what message it is used to send and to which audiences (and which audiences is it looking to exclude).
Anyway, this is a departmental bulletin paper and it is not peer reviewed, but I still think it is pretty good stuff, even if it isn’t part of my research specialisms.
Kasamura, I., Liu, J., Nishimura, T., & Jones, M. (2024). The linguistic landscape of restaurant menus. Journal of Regional Development Studies, 27, 189-199.
Conferencing, PhDing, Translanguaging
Ooh, exciting times last week. I mean, it’s relative, but my Spring is usually spent catching up on research stuff, thinking about new teaching materials as new ways to generate extra workload for myself. This year, I went to Germany. It was my first time to leave Japan since I went on holiday to Thailand in 2010.
Coincidences being what they are, my trip managed to fall exactly on a German transport workers’ strike. I had my connecting flight from Paris to Düsseldorf cancelled, so Air France put me up in a hotel for the night. I then travelled on to Dortmund, because it was cheaper to stay there and I was going to go to TU Dortmund later in the week to meet my PhD supervisor.
Dortmund reminds me very much of Sunderland in that it is a very industrial town and obsessed with football. I ate a lot of bread and a modicum of cake. I have loved German bread since German class in comprehensive school.
The next day I travelled to Münster for the Foreign Language Listening Comprehension (LiCo) conference. I presented some of my PhD research (and I will share the slides when the research gets published or accepted for publication – it is basically a more finished version of this J-SLA poster presentation). I also saw some great presentations and a workshop by Jens Folkert Folkerts and Christine Goh. Everyone was lovely, but what was lovelier even than that was the cakes and sweets. Even lovelier still was I got to meet my classmates from TU Dortmund, Stewart and Sara, whom I had only met on Zoom before.
On the second day of the conference I attempted to hit up a symposium that my other classmate Raúl Garcia had set up. Unfortunately my superhuman powers of transportation got me there after it was all over. I did, however, get to meet Raúl for the first time, and meet my PhD supervisor Carolyn and also Martina Emke, for whom I had been a research participant before. We chatted about a lot of things. And then the next day I went back to the university and talked about a lot of things, but focused much more on my PhD.
As for the PhD, my publishing schedule (and prerequisite writing schedule) got discussed, as well as how to set up my capstone thesis. I am currently aiming for an August submission, which is considerably less tight than my previous self-imposed deadline of mid-April.
I then went to lunch with Martina and Carolyn, Joanna, a visiting researcher advising Raúl on his project, and most of my classmates, including also Christina, the post-doc in the department. It was lovely and I talked too much so it took me ages to finish my meal (exactly the thing I tell my son not to do)!
So, lots done, and I got to use my German half remembered from GCSE, refreshed by Duolingo and the Goethe Institut and not massively come off like a total idiot – or at least, if I did it probably wasn’t to do with my grasp of the language. There’s an awful lot of English that has crept into most world languages, and German is no exception, and also most Germans speak English in an easy to understand way, so it was a nice experience to believe I had become communicative in a language to meet immediate needs. However, whenever someone answered me at whipcrack speed, I could also roll out old faithful: Tut mir leid. Bitte noch einmal, mein Deutsch ist nicht so gut.
On the way back, my connection from Paris to Tokyo got cancelled, so by the end, I felt like Homer (the Greek one, not the American one). But yes, fruitful trip, and an enjoyable trip once I got over the jet lag.
Journal article: Exploring Duoethnography in ELT Research Ecosystems: Accessibility, Misuse, and Further Horizons
Recently, my friend and colleague Robert Lowe and I published an article in the International Review of Qualitative Research titled Exploring Duoethnography in ELT Research Ecosystems: Accessibility, Misuse, and Further Horizons. Basically, it’s a duoethnography about doing duoethnography, which could be silly and frivolous, but we are quite serious. We both really respect duoethnography as a research method: I have co-authored four duoethnographies including this one, and Rob has written a few, as well as having co-edited a book about it, which also contains some duoethnographies co-authored by him. Basically, we offer a critique of the method, look at how it can be used by researchers who do not typically use qualitative inquiry in their work, and express our ideas about where duoethnography, especially in English language teaching research, could go next.
While we both appreciate the affordances of duoethnography the fact remains that it is subject to many of the same flaws as autoethnography. Essentially, in the wrong hands, it is a method of navel gazing introspection for the sake of it. The authorial partnership should be critical, but in too many duoethnographies there is only backslapping and sycophancy. We hope that is not what we have done in any of our own work.
We also puzzle over why so few quantitative researchers have taken up duoethnography. I have a bit of a fancy idea about it being part of a research ecosystem. I think everyone should either have a go with it or at least quantitative researchers should be actively reading and citing qualitative inquiry including duoethnography. We all need all kinds of research. I also question whether duoethnography needs to be purely qualitative or whether there can be quantitative elements included. This last idea is one that I hope comes to fruition, because I think that it could help make duoethnography more appealing to a wider range of researchers.
If you don’t have access to the paper, you can email me and I can send it along.
Book Chapter: Communicating Information for Decision Making: Reflections on a Leadership Communication Course
Just this morning I got word from one of the editors of the book I have a chapter in that it is now online and published. The book, Leaderful Classroom Pedagogy Through an Interdisciplinary Lens: Merging Theory with Practice, edited by Soyhan Egitim and Yu Umemiya, is quite a wedge (and being an academic book published by Springer, costs some wedge, too), and is highly focused on classroom practice regarding leadership in its many guises.
Anyway, I am very happy to be included, and even happier to have the chance to read everyone else’s chapters.
Presentation: Multiliteracies for student presentations
Yesterday at JALT National Conference in Tsukuba I presented something about how I worked with my students in the last presentation skills course I taught. I often had students isolate interesting/key data points from charts and tables and revisualise them in better, more salient ways, usually with pens and paper.
Also, weirdly for me, I used Keynote for my slides. I don’t hate them, but I prefer my usual template.
The slides are here. Some graphs are deliberately bad, because they should be compared with better graphs.
Poster: Does seeing vowels increase the probability of acquisition?
On 14th October I presented a poster based on my PhD research with Prof. Carolyn Blume, who sadly couldn’t make it to the conference. I got a lot of very interesting feedback.
This was my first actual poster presentation that I had given, and I hope that I used the principles in Zen Faulkes’ book Better Posters well.
Here is the poster if you are interested in reading it.
Get students to select preferred work with the board
I am currently working on a short teaching-related article for university teachers – and I thought I could park some example screenshots here, regarding my use of Jamboard, which is going to be killed off by Google. However, all is not lost, because not only are there other alternatives available, such as Padlet, and if you have work in person, you can also use physical blackboards and whiteboards.
I did this with students when they were making SDGs related Open Educational Resources available on my learner-related blog. (Aside – I really regret calling it Get Great English, now because it seems really boastful, but I guess it’s what I want my students to actually get).
Anyway, I set up the Jamboard and got them to select their top three choices. I told them I would try to accommodate their first choices if possible but it depended on how many people chose different topics out of the 36 students in the class.
It worked well, and it’s somewhat painless. It took me about 10 minutes to group students, and they were all satisfied with the groupings.
As I mentioned above, this could all be done with a physical board and sticky notes, too.
The next stages are that students manage their projects with elements of Agile management and Scrum meetings, inspired by Rebecca Pope-Ruark’s book Agile Faculty.
Presentation: Listening & CALL: a critical review
I presented at the JALT Listening SIG Conference yesterday. I got some interesting feedback. Here are my slides.
I am using ‘critical’ here in the layperson sense, not the critical theory sense.
All rights reserved. #nobot
Presentation: Using Duoethnography to Build Academic Skills
Today I presented at JACET 4th Joint Seminar on some duoethnography with my class. Please find the slides here.
Software that helped 2022: Obsidian and Espanso
2022 was a year that felt like ten years crammed into one. It was my first wholly face-to-face year since I started at my current job (the year before was lots of on-campus and off-campus). I found two good pieces of software through Mastodon, and thought I would share them with the two people who read this (and their dogs).
Obsidian: notes with tags
Obsidian is now one of the most often used applications on my computers. I use it to take notes and also write documents that do not need to be shared with co-authors, editors or supervisors. The notes are taggable, and can be visualised in a web similar to spider diagrams. Additionally, when the header system and list system are used, parts that are not being edited right at that moment can be hidden away and brought back very easily. The files are eminently transferable between devices. I choose to not sync but purposefully move data between devices for data protection and also utility. Some devices do not need all my notes, such as my novel in progress does not need to be on my phone or my work PC. Also, getting into Obsidian Markdown has helped me with learning R Markdown considerably. I still feel that I have barely scratched the surface but it is very useful.
Espanso
I seem to use Espanso more often than I think. The main useful interface is text documents in which one adds text short cuts. An example might be:
:hwwhich may then suddenly change to:
Hello world!It works well, is uncomplicated and allows for subject specific lists to be added. I use a mainly limited feature set but I am very impressed so far. I have a couple of very nascent additions to the Espanso base file, but feel free to use them (these are very much works in progress, and I am unlikely to update them on here). They are text documents, but you can open them and ‘Save as’ and give them a .yml extension.
A set of academic shortcuts, with very nascent shortcuts (only 2) for academic writing advice, because I mainly use Google Classroom comments.
A file that has some language and phonology shortcuts.