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: Investigating English Language Teachers’ Beliefs and Stated Practices Regarding Bottom-up Processing Instruction for Listening in L2 English

An article based upon my MA dissertation has just been published in the Journal of Second Language Teaching & Research. It is Open Access so you can access the full text, but here is a summary a bit longer than the abstract.

Language learners face difficulties in parsing what they hear into a meaningful message. There are still gaps in SLA research about how we do this and about how it can be taught. There was nothing about bottom-up (phonology level, syllable-level) listening. There is not much research on what teachers do or say that they do, so I wanted find out about this.

Not much has changed since John Field (2008) said that “the Comprehension Approach” dominates how listening is taught. This was supported by Siegel (2014), who found that most teachers used comprehension-based activities.

Based on speech learning models (Best, 1995; Flege, 1995, 2007), it would be advisable to educate learners to discern the difference between sounds (phonemes) that form part of the language being learned, but which do not form part of their first language. Also, ongoing practice with variations in these sounds would be helpful.

With words and grammar, there might be a psychological process of cueing (Ellis, 2006), which might also explain lexical priming and collocation. However, making things stand out appears to be key. Making things stand out does not mean only teaching isolated, citation-form words because this does not always carry over to listening skill acquisition (Bonk, 2000; Joyce, 2013). Instead this need to be balanced with listening to natural connected speech.

I wanted to find out whether teachers taught learners to decode single words and phrases, connected speech and phonological differences between languages. I did this by questionnaire and asked people over Twitter. I analysed the data in JASP and did some explorations in the data.

There is not a total absence of bottom-up instruction. A lot of use of stresses corresponded with bottom up instruction. A minority of teachers in my sample used knowledge of phonology of their learners’ first languages. There is a correlation between using this knowledge and regular single sound (phoneme) and connected speech instruction. However, there is a reluctance among teachers to teach single sounds and words. However, it should be noted that this is a minority activity. Most teachers in the sample said they did not consider differences between first and second language phonology, are reluctant or do not regularly teach decoding of single words and , phrases, though connected speech may be taught slightly more regularly.

References (in this summary)

Best C. T. (1995) A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception, in Strange, W. (ed.) Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience. York Press. 171-206. Retrieved April 25th 2017 from http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0996.pdf

Bonk, W. J. (2000) Second Language Lexical Knowledge and Listening Comprehension, International Journal of Listening, 14:1, 14-31, DOI:10.1080/10904018.2000.10499033

Ellis, N. (2006) Language acquisition as rational contingency learning. Applied Linguistics 27, pp. 1-24

Field, J. (2008) Listening in the Language Classroom (ebook). Cambridge: CUP.

Flege, J. (1995) Second-language Speech Learning: Theory, Findings, and Problems. In Strange, W. (Ed) Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross-language research. Timonium, MD: York Press, pp. 229-273.

Flege, J. (2007) Language contact in bilingualism: Phonetic system interactions. In Cole, J. & Hualde, J. I. (Eds.), Laboratory Phonology 9. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 353-380.

JASP Team (2017). JASP (Version 0.8.1.2)[Computer software]. Retrieved June 25th 2017 from https://jasp-stats.org/download/

Joyce, P. (2013) Word Recognition Processing Efficiency as a Component of Second Language Listening, International Journal of Listening, 27:1, 13-24, DOI:10.1080/10904018.2013.732407

Siegel, J. (2014) Exploring L2 listening instruction: examinations of practice. ELT J 2014; 68 (1): 22-30. doi:10.1093/elt/cct058

Surveying university English language instructors’ development provision and expenses in the shift to online teaching

Hello. I have been thinking about the current English language teaching situation and the shift to online instruction around the world due to the global COVID19 pandemic. If you are an English language instructor at a university, please consider taking the time to answer my questionnaire. I will write up a working paper based on the results within the month (with updates).

Link to Google Form.