Marc Jones

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.

Just an example of the way I used the Jamboard, not the students’ actual Jamboard.

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.

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.

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.

Plans for 2019

Thanks for dropping by. I ended 2018 with a last gasp submission to New Sounds 2019, which links to my MRes research project on phoneme acquisition. Hopefully I get accepted but it looks a lot more scientific than anything I have been a part of so far. It will be good to get out of my comfort zone somewhat, though.

I also have a full-time job to start in April, which I am looking forward to very much. I will be teaching first-year university students so I am looking at articles on the transition between high school and university. I also want my students to make the most of the new self-access centre thst will open at the university so I am also looking at self-access and autonomous learning, too. I am particularly interested in learners’ autonomous L2 listening, so hopefully I shall gain some more useful insights into this.

Further on into the year, I should be collecting data over a 13-week period. This should conclude the the bulk of the pre-writing of my MRes dissertation.

Other than that, I do not know other classes that I will teach as a part-time instructor at my part-time job but I foresee making at least one corpus and doing some more work on essay writing and managing learner expectations and enabling them to assess their own abilities more accurately.