Marc Jones

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.

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.

The graph view is not very linked on my home PC. But I am at home because I was ill. I might change this image tomorrow when I get to my work PC.

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:

:hw

which 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.

academicDownload

A set of academic shortcuts, with very nascent shortcuts (only 2) for academic writing advice, because I mainly use Google Classroom comments.

languageDownload

A file that has some language and phonology shortcuts.

Manage life with a Bullet Journal

Anybody who knows me, both colleagues and students, know that I am rather evangelical about Bullet Journalling. It was one of the tools that helped me with my MRes. It’s not a panacea for every problem in the world but it can really make a lot more sense to see what needs to be done, and what gets done every day. I carry it everywhere and basically manage life with a Bullet Journal. It is a diary, research notebook and external hard drive for my brain.

There are some great introductory videos on YouTube, but in essence you use an ordinary notebook, you set up monthly calendars, a future log and daily logs, and an index for finding things later. The index is more of a reactive contents page that you add to as you go.

How I do it

The types of pages and spreads that I set up are:

Personal Index

Work Index

Research/PhD Index

Admin: Mainly reminders of passwords, but not the actual passwords.

Recurring items: Mainly birthdays and anniversaries, but also recurring deadlines like using up my research budget.

Achievements: Good stuff makes you happy, and it can be useful for listing things on CVs or other places.

Future Log: A 2-page spread. Upcoming 5 months plus other. The first 2 months are likely more crowded so they get a page to themselves. The next 3 and other are divided into boxes of decreasing size.

Monthly Brain Dump and Eisenhower Matrix: A 2-page spread. The brain dump is a list of everything that needs to be done, or is migrated from previous future logs. It all gets migrated to the Eisenhower Matrix .

Eisenhower Matrix – basically a grid of Urgent/Not Urgent, Important/Not Important

The Eisenhower matrix is where I organize items from the Brain Dump. Anything with a date attached to it (like events) gets moved to the schedule and bypasses the matrix. I can then see how to rank items for the month.

Monthly schedule and task list: A 2-page spread. Events and tasks with deadlines go onto the calendar page. Tasks that are open go onto the task list. These are from the Eisenhower Matrix and ranked according to importance and urgency.

Publication Pipeline: Cribbed from Ellie Mackin Roberts.

Daily logs: To-do lists and rapid-logging items, including ideas, notes and more.

Lesson recording: What do I observe in my lessons. What is good, not good. What is my evaluation and what do I do next?

Anything else is fair game, too, like pages of maths for working out the values of formants and/or vocal tract space based on equations, ideas for writing, reading notes, and more.

New Article: Problems Teaching Listening Online

I have a new article, on Problems Teaching Listening Online. It is quite short, and is published on The Language Scholar website. It should be in the next issue of the journal.

The reviewer who guided me through revisions did a wonderful job encouraging me to a be clearer in my writing. Hopefully it is clear and, I hope, useful.

Problems Teaching Listening Online

Preprints are awesome

I haven’t blogged here for a while because I have been busy writing other things, I have several projects on the go at the same time as usual because I hate being bored. Also, new job starting in April! I thought I would take a little time to pour out my thoughts about language teaching research, especially that done by teachers, and why preprint servers are fantastic. This post is aimed at very early career researchers like MA graduates or teachers who want to share findings with the wider research community (hello underrepresented teachers of young learners!)

Preprints are free and they can be updated based on any feedback that you get. You get your research out into the world while you wait for peer review (although check the policy of the journal you are submitting to). If you get feedback, usually through hypothes.is, you can address it quickly and the state of your research is basically much like a blog but you get a DOI for easy citation. This is something I have done with a few projects because I get really frustrated waiting to find out even whether my article has gone out for review.

Another good point about preprints is that if you cannot publish in an open-access journal, or afford to pay an extortionate article processing charge (APC), you can normally put up the preprint version, but check the journal’s policies first.

But Marc, why not just blog it if it isn’t peer reviewed? Well, the point is that it could be peer reviewed. Also, who is going to read an 8,000 word blog post? It would be a massive pain if you wanted to quote a part of it. You can also share your preprints on Research Gate (I virtually-met someone who didn’t know about Research Gate yet). I have 900 reads on there and about 1000 on SocArxiv if I remember right. This is pretty decent, I think.

So, yes, preprinting is great. You might get feedback, you might not, but at least people will be able to find your work.

Zotero resources

It’s been a while since I posted anything here. I finished my MRes, and got a Pass with Merit (to be confirmed, but the numbers in Moodle say so), and I am looking in great detail at doing a PhD.

Regarding the PhD, I’ll need something to support my reading and referencing a bit more. I’ve been learning R and R Markdown, though my knowledge is still a bit basic. Knowing that Zotero references can be plugged straight into R Markdown (apparently) comforts me a lot. Another thing that eases my mind is that you can create ‘Smart Playlists’ like when iTunes wasn’t bloated enough to crash constantly. (FOSS Academic) and that led me into a bit of a Zotero rabbit hole. There I was just happy to import BibTeX or DOIs, and I find, hiding in plain sight, this wonderful manual.

Appearance on the TEFLology Podcast

The TEFLology podcast (one of the hosts is my supervisor at my main job, just to get that out in the open) recently had a couple of episodes recorded live and I was on there for a bit of time in the second part (episode 104). It was really fun, and I am definitely keen on appearing on other people’s podcasts.

Slides on a Zoom session on Feedback with educators in Japan

The slides for this morning’s Zoom session on feedback are here.

Notes

  • We need a balance between general and detailed feedback.
  • Rubrics alone are not seen as useful. Notes on performance outside/beyond the rubric and more detailed feedback is required (NB, maybe not written).
  • Ongoing dialogic feedback, with perhaps a reflective plan of action (say a few bullet points) from students, could be more useful overall in facilitating student engagement with feedback.

Update

A podcast episode with related methodologies by Sascha Stollhans was put out by Dustin Hosseini.