Applied Linguistics Commons^™

Complexifying Paid Learning, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

Learning And Job Advancement: Insights From A Follow-Up Questionnaire, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

Over the course of our research project, we were able to interview 27 working Learners employed in frontline service work in the US. Our plans to expand this data set and conduct in-person follow-up interviews was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to have some sense of what our participants' education, work, and lived experiences were like in the year after our interviews, we sent a follow-up questionnaire to all 27 in the summer of 2021 and received responses from 13 individuals. It was important for us to reconnect with these learners after more than a year of societal …

Limitations Of Our Working Learner Persona: Insights From Research Partners, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

Learning And Advancement: Insights From Research Partners, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

Part of our research process has been to engage the voices of individuals involved in employer-supported education and training initiatives or otherwise impacted by the issues we have been investigating. To this end, we hosted a series of convenings to discuss our findings and invited a group of 12 interested parties who represented a range of backgrounds and experience in the workforce development system to respond to our initial observations, to make sure that we are doing things that were relevant and useful, and to identify things that we had missed or that we didn't get right.

Participants in the …

Synthesizing And Disseminating Research Findings Digitally, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

No abstract provided.

Collaborative Digital Problem-Solving: Power, Relationships, And Participation, Gloria E. Jacobs, Jill Castek

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The study examines the collaborative nature of problem solving as dyads and triads of adults were grouped to solve digital problems using online resources. Digital problem solving involves the nimble use of skills, strategies, and mindsets to navigate online in everyday contexts using novel resources, tools, and interfaces, in efficient and flexible ways, to accomplish personal and professional goals. Findings address the nature of collaborative talk during digital problem solving through three interrelated categories of themes gleaned from discourse analysis: (a) power, (b) relationships, and (c) participation. These themes offer a nuanced understanding of collaborative interactions during digital problem solving. …

Considering Who Has Opportunities For Training And Advancement, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

The three working learners featured in this blog post represent contrasting experiences that help us to understand the level and quality of support from such mediators as has become evident in our research, and the resu Its on the careers of these learners. Al I names used are pseudonyms.

Linguistic Discrimination In Higher Education In Vietnam, Y Dang Nhu Tran

University Honors Theses

Prof. John Baugh has remarked that "this greater linguistic unity will help us all as we move toward the future" (Baugh, 2019). This qualitative research paper addresses the causes of linguistic discrimination and the impacts on current college students in Vietnam via three students from different regions (North, Central, and South) at one university. The paper examines linguistic discrimination and how political and linguistic identity have shaped behavior and social interaction on the part of three young Vietnamese intellectuals. The literature examines a brief history of Vietnamese language and culture, research paradigms in linguistic discrimination, and learning culture.

Naomi: Learning For Future Possibilities, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

We've published 5 blog posts that present different personas of working learners. These personas are drawn from our interviews with frontline worker learners across the country who are participating in employer-supported learning opportunities. The personas characterize aspects of a set of real people - capturing and blending them in order to create one story that illustrates a broader representation of a participant in an employer-supported educational program or course.

21st Century Learning Ecosystem For Working Learners, Kathy Harris, Jen Vanek,, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs

21CLEO Presentations and Publications

• What are the experiences of working learners in employer sponsored learning?
• What motivates frontline service workers to participate in employer sponsored learning opportunities, many of which are offered online?
• What factors support working learners’ continued participation and their success?

Equity Journey To Crt, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

By thinking about racism and all social justice work as a systemic issue rather than a set of individual actions, we are led to question the underlying structures that may be undermining working learners' success despite the best efforts of all involved. Adopting the lens of CRT in our work is meant to provoke change and prompt healing. It has caused us to question our role as researchers and our place as educators in the social justice movement. It has challenged us to move out of the safety of academia and to think of our research as social action. The …

Sources Of Individual Differences In Adults’ Ict Skills: A Large-Scale Empirical Test Of A New Guiding Framework, Alexandra Wicht, Stephen Reder, Clemens M. Lechner

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We develop an integrative conceptual framework that seeks to explain individual differences in the ability to use information and communication technologies (ICT skills). Building on practice engagement theory, this framework views the continued usage of digital technologies at work and in everyday life (ICT use) as the key prerequisite for the acquisition of ICT skills. At the same time, the framework highlights that ICT use is itself contingent upon individual and contextual preconditions. We apply this framework to data from two recent German large-scale studies (N = 2,495 and N = 2,786, respectively) that offer objective measures of adults’ ICT …

So, Why Persona?, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

A colleague asked us a thoughtful and compelling question - why did we create the personas and how do these personas help employers, human resources staff, people working in workforce education, and those in adult education? We wrote this blog post to address those questions.

How Indigenous-Language Court Interpreters And Clients Navigate The U.S. Court System Under Strict Court-Interpreting Guidelines, Ashten Lehwalder

University Honors Theses

In Oregon, requests for court interpreters of languages indigenous to Latin America have increased within the last few years. However, the number of available indigenous-language court interpreters in the U.S. remains low. During the 2019 U.S.--Mexico Border Crisis, many refugees seeking asylum were from Mayan communities; indigenous-language court interpreters struggled to meet the demand. Even though court interpreting is a civil right in the U.S., many individuals have been afforded inadequate language services, or have gone without interpreters altogether. This study seeks to understand the experience of indigenous-language court interpreters, who must operate according to a code of ethics, through …

Dani: Front-Line Supervisor Paid Hourly Seeking Certification For Advancement, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

In our final two blog posts we offer personas based on people who are working to earn a degree or certificate, including Regina: Healthcare worker seeking to establish a career and, here in our final persona to date, Dani, an hourly frontline supervisor who wants to earn a certificate and advance her career.

A Corpus Approach Study On The Manzanar Free Press, Danielle Jochums

University Honors Theses

Past studies on the physical environment of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II have argued that internees were able to express their agency and identity despite the dehumanization of the camps. However, studies on the newspapers circulated in the camps have argued that internees had no agency as they worked on newspapers. In a preliminary reading, it was clear that these newspapers evidenced internee agency in their language. Utilizing de Certeau's theoretical framework of tactics, this study addressed the following questions: What tactics did Japanese-American internees use to take agency when writing and editing camp newspapers? How did …

Rewilding Language Education: Emergent Assemblages And Entangled Actions, Steven L. Thorne, John Hellermann, Teppo Jakonen

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Integrating concepts and techniques from ethnomethodology and sociomaterialism, this article investigates the observable material processes involving human action and place-based contexts of language use enabled by locative media. The focal pedagogical intervention utilized mobile augmented reality (AR) activities, the development of which was inspired by research on learning ‘in the wild.’ Applying the principle of reverse engineering, we introduce a pedagogical approach termed ‘rewilding’ for its emphasis on designing supportive conditions for goal-directed interaction outside of classrooms. Three instances of AR materials use are presented from an out-of-class activity associated with university-level language courses involving a quest-type AR game called …

Regina: Healthcare Worker Seeking To Establish A Career, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

In this post, we share our fourth persona, this one based on people who are working to earn a degree or certificate.

Elise: Juggling Work, Required Training, And Long-Term Goals, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

In past posts we talked about how we are using persona as a research tool and our process for creating personas. In our last post we described Neberu, who is working to feel comfortable interacting with English speakers. In the next several posts we will continue to present the personas we have created.

Neberu: Working To Feel Comfortable Interacting With English Speakers, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

In the next several biogs we will continue to present the personas we have created based on our interviews with working learners.

Alimayu: College-Educated Retail Worker Learning English, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

In past blogs we talked about how we are using persona as a research tool and our process for creating personas. In the next several biogs we will present the personas we have created based on our interviews with working learners.

Changing Practices For Connected Discourse: Starting And Developing Topics In Conversation, John Hellermann, Yo-An Lee

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper investigates the actions and practices for connected discourse in English conversation. Three university students met weekly for 94 weeks to practice speaking and were video recorded. Each participant made a 10 min presentation about a topic of interest and then the three participants had a conversation. Using ethnomethodological conversation analysis (CA), we examined how participants moved from an orientation to one type of speech exchange system (the monologic presentation) to another (the ‘conversation’) and specifically, the actions and practices for getting the conversation started. We show how an orientation to an interview type of speech exchange system changes …

Adult Literacy And Learning: What Does Analysis Based On Critical Racetheory Reveal?, Kathy Harris, Jen Vanek,, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs

21CLEO Presentations and Publications

This work is part of a larger project focused on understanding a changing and dynamic learning ecosystem

● frontline service workers participate in workforce or employer supported learning opportunities.

● includes data from 45 interviews with worker learners and individuals who provide support to them, such as teachers, managers, and career navigators.

● Interviewees come from all parts of the United States and work in retail, healthcare, hospitality, transportation, and other industries.

Variation In Female And Male Dialogue In Buffy The Vampire Slayer: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis, Amber Morgan Sanchez

Dissertations and Theses

Media representations of gender often reflect normative societal beliefs about gender and have the ability to both reinforce and subvert those beliefs. The current study examines the linguistic characterization of male and female characters on the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a series with an overt feminist message. Previous studies of gender variation in dramatic dialogue have found that female characters tend to be portrayed as using more linguistic features associated with an interpersonal and emotional focus (involvement), while male characters are portrayed as using more features centered on the transfer of information. Previous research has also found …

Persona Development: Unpacking The Process, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

In our last post, we introduced the concept of personas and discussed how we are using personas to create a compelling and approachable representation of our aggregated interview data with working learners. Our hope is that the personas we develop will help practitioners and program developers better understand the working learners' experiences. We have found that personas help us illustrate who working learners are and situate our findings within the existing instructional design paradigm. In this post, we discuss our process for creating person as.

A Computer Science Academic Vocabulary List, David Roesler

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis documents the development of the Computer Science Academic Vocabulary List (CSAVL), a pedagogical tool intended for use by English-for-specific-purpose educators and material developers. A 3.5-million-word corpus of academic computer science textbooks and journal articles was developed in order to produce the CSAVL. This study draws on the improved methodologies used in the creation of recent lemma-based word lists such as the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) and the Medical Academic Vocabulary List (MAVL), which take into account the discipline-specific meanings of academic vocabulary. The CSAVL provides specific information for each entry, including part of speech and CS-specific meanings in …

Persona Development As A Research Tool, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

In order to make our description of working-learners who participate in employer-supported educational activities more vivid, we have taken a unique approach to better represent why characteristics of a particular learning opportunity may or may not align with working-learners' needs. This approach involves creating personas from interview data we've gathered in three areas: mandated courses and training, basic education, and degree or certificate attaining courses/programs.

Using Spoken Dialogue Technology For L2 Speaking Practice: What Do Teachers Think?, Veronika Timpe-Laughlin, Tetyana Sydorenko, Phoebe Daurio

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Often, second/foreign (L2) language learners receive little opportunity to interact orally in the target language. Interactive, conversation-based spoken dialog systems (SDSs) that use automated speech recognition and natural language processing have the potential to address this need by engaging learners in meaningful, goal-oriented speaking practice. However, these technology-based learning tools are often developed without input from teaching professionals. As part of a larger development effort, this study examined English as a second language (ESL) teachers’ perceptions regarding SDS-based speaking tasks, addressing the following research questions: (a) What do teachers think about the SDS-based tasks? (b) How would they use them …

All In One Place: References Cited In 21 Cleo Work, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

We have created a Google sheet that contains the resources that we've used in our blog posts so far. You can sort or filter the sheet by author, title, keyword, etc. to easily find what you're looking for. We've also included a brief summary of each article. You can download or save the sheet to your drive. We will continue to update it as we discover new materia I, so be sure to check back on occasion. We hope that you find it useful!

21cleo: First Year Recap, 21cleo Research Team

21CLEO Research Project Blog Posts

In this post, we recap our experiences, accomplishments, and challenges. We hope that by reviewing the past year, we can provide a sense of where we've been and set the stage for things to come.