Marc Jones

Language teachers with ADHD – summary

Some of you who follow me on other websites might have noticed that I posted a couple of preprints coauthored with Gretchen Clark in the last week or so. In this post I will cover both of those preprints and also our article in the special issue of FLuL edited by the tireless Jules Bündgens-Kosten and Carolyn Blume (2024) (Prof. Blume being the best PhD supervisor one could ever hope for, and then some!), and also the duoethnography written my myself and Matthew Noble, all of which look at ADHD in language teachers.

Nearly two years ago, my friend and colleague Matthew Noble and I published our duoethnography in the JALT Teacher Development SIG journal, Explorations in Teacher Development. This article was something that we both looked forward to initially but near the end of the project grew somewhat fatigued and maybe even fraught.

the duoethnographic process could be so challenging that it felt for Matthew “like staring into the sun” and for me (Marc) like a stomach-churning process wherein certain elements of my past, like alcoholism, had to be revisited (Jones & Noble, 2023, p. 36).

However, the paper came up with some useful ideas, in my opinion. We discussed what seemed to work for us to channel our ADHD into our work effectively, and how to work without some of the ADHD traits derailing our work. Processes like Teaching Unplugged/Dogme (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009), being prepared to teach reactively rather than planning in deep detail, could potentially be useful for teachers like us. Additionally, we noted that having set spaces to prepare and store materials rather than ad-hoc places seemed to be more suited to us.

After the duoethnography, I undertook a questionnaire study with the frankly wonderful Gretchen Clark. Gretchen had just undertaken a questionnaire study on listening, and had also given a poster presentation on teaching students with ADHD. We also found that we both have ADHD.

The questionnaire study was approached with a quantitative approach looking at correlations in experiences and self-efficacy (how well you think you can do certain things) and a qualitative approach called frame analysis, which looks at the overall data and interprets how participants seem to frame their experiences and perspectives of a topic, in our case ADHD (Jones & Clark, 2024). We also used a theme analysis of what teachers said, that is, a more detailed examination of the qualitative data (Clark & Jones, under review). In the 2024 article we found that perceived ADHD traits basically have no relation to teacher self efficacy, and also that teachers didn’t frame their experiences in relation to the subject of language, but within education more generally. In the theme analysis, we found that there is a tendency toward extremes of planning lessons, both toward highly structured planning and that of being prepared but of no exact plan, which echoes the perceived benefits of Teaching Unplugged mentioned in Jones and Noble (2023).

We followed the questionnaire study with an interview study of nine Japan-based non-Japanese participants selected from the questionnaire sample (Clark & Jones, submitted). These participants were selected further based upon availability and their interesting answers. This more detailed, granular data showed us that teachers were wary of potential stigma associated with disclosing their ADHD status, or that they were indeed discriminated against by a senior colleague in one case. However, the teachers were conscientious in their work, creative and considering the students they worked with, and aimed to make their working environments fit to them in order to help create effective learning conditions.

What I have learned from my involvement in these studies was that far from the ‘disorder’ that teachers with ADHD may experience, they care about their work so much that they frequently hyperfocus on aspects of their work, particularly the creative aspects such as materials development and lesson planning. They value assigned preparation spaces such as offices or set spaces where they are not disturbed (Jones & Noble, 2023; Clark & Jones, submitted). There are negative aspects to the work, such as very routine work such as marking and administrative tasks, and these may prove particularly difficult for teachers to do, but they work through any difficulties in order to do their work with pride.

References

Bündgens-Kosten, J., & Blume, C. (Eds.). (2024). Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen, 53(2): Themenschwerpunkt, Neurodiversität in Fremdsprachenunterricht und -lehrkräftebildung. Narr Verlag. https://elibrary.narr.digital/journal/flul/2024/2

Clark, G., & Jones, M. (Under review). Workplace experiences of language teachers with ADHD. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.14789397

Clark, G., & Jones, M. (Submitted). Workplace orientations of language teachers with ADHD. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14810522

Jones, M., & Clark, G. (2024). Language teachers with ADHD: Self-efficacy and framings. Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen, 53(2). https://doi.org/10.24053/FLuL-2024-0025

Jones, M., & Noble, M. (2023). “What about teachers?”: A duoethnographic exploration of ADHD in ELT. Explorations in Teacher Development, 29(1), 34–45. https://td.jalt.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/ETD-291-Jones-Noble.pdf

Meddings, L., & Thornbury, S. (2009). Teaching unplugged: Dogme in English language teaching. Delta Publishing. https://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/book/teaching-unplugged-9783125013568/?page_id=1

New publication: Language teachers with ADHD: self-efficacy and framings

Two posts in a day! I must be ill or something.

Anyway, as with the post about teaching using duoethnography to foster critical multiliteracies, this also bears the influence of Robert Lowe, my friend and old supervisor when I worked at Tokyo Kasei University. Rob has written entire books on/using frame analysis, and so, having discussed things with each other when nerding out about research, it was probably inevitable that I would end up using frame analysis eventually.

This article is in a special issue of Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen on neurodiversity edited by the frankly wonderful Jules Bündgens-Kosten and my PhD supervisor Carolyn Blume. My co-author, Gretchen Clark and I conducted a questionnaire study into language teachers’ experiences and this article reports our quantitative findings and some qualitative analysis using some framing as mentioned above, although a combination of Goffman’s frame analysis and how Rob used frame analysis.

Continue reading →

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.

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.

A photograph of two medium-size pine cones side by side on brown grass. There are two much smaller pine cones by the one on the right, and they are not immediately obvious.

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.

Publication: Accent Difference Makes No Difference to Phoneme Acquisition

As of today, my article with Carolyn Blume from TU Dortmund is available in the special issue of TESL-EJ on Global Englishes and translanguaging. It is open-access so it is available for free.

We used TED talks as online self-study, with one group watching talks by speakers of prestige varieties of English (so-called ‘native speakers’) and one group watching speakers outside of these prestige varieties.

The title says it all: there were no real differences between groups. Somewhat worryingly, neither group made gains in vowel learning, which was what we were intending they learned. Both were the same, although a limitation could be learners cramming at the last minute. However, this is something students do!

The article is here, and check out the whole of the special issue while you are there.

New Publication on Teaching Linguistic Landscape Research

Image of signs at Odawara station, Japan. "Think Mirai, Odawara 2030, Sustainable development goals" and some Japanese a bit too small to read clearly. Another sign reads 衆議院議員総選挙及び最高裁判所裁判官国民審査.
A photograph taken at Odawara station, Kanagawa, 2021.

Hello. It has been a while. I am currently busy with PhD study and have been developing a new, old hobby. In the interim, I have been preparing a couple of journal articles and had this conference paper under review.

I have taught linguistic landscape research projects to undergraduates as part of their language studies at universities in and around Tokyo for 4 years now, with one year where I did not teach a course suitable for integrating it. I believe it provides a way to have learners become more aware of the ways in which English as well as other languages are used around them and see greater value in their own language practices, rather than a deficit view. I have been frequently astonished at just how well my students have completed their work, which are typically short group projects with all teaching and learning involved conducted over a four-week period.

I presented this as a conference paper at JAAL in JACET in December. After the review of the proceedings, I gained yet more insight into my teaching and students’ learning through the reviewer questions. The conference paper citation and link are:

Jones, M. (2022b). Teaching Linguistic Landscape Research: Encouraging Learner Cognition About Language Practices. JAAL in JACET Proceedings, 4, 60–64. https://www.jacet.org/publication/jaal-in-jacet-proceedings/

I really do welcome comments on this, with the caveat that this was not intended as a full research project, but as a way to show something that is relatively interesting as a classroom practice.