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About Meng-Wei Lin: A Teacher, a Language Learner, and a Language Lover

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Languaging in the U.K.

    A Spanish teacher I met in Ecuador told me, “Once you become a language teacher, you cannot stop analyzing language wherever you go.” I found this to be true after noticing my “language pictures” increased when I went backpackaging in the U.K. I have come to realize, over the past two years, that I have turned myself into a language teacher from someone who was just interested in language.

As a language learner

    Born in a multilingual family (my father speaks Southern Min and Mandarin, and my mother speaks Hakka and Mandarin), I have a strong awareness toward languages and translingual practices. Because of my love toward Chinese literature and Chinese history, I chose History as my undergraduate major, but kept learning English and Japanese. The experience as an EFL learner led me to question the role of English education in Taiwan. 

Teaching EFL in Otavalo

Become a teacher

    My professional training was mainly done in the MA-TESL program offered by the department of Applied Linguistics in the Pennsylvania State University. The TESOL-Ecuador program also provided me with teaching and immersion learning experience, which gave me an insight of English teaching in other EFL context. Both of them prepared me with the knowledge as well as experiences to become an ambitious and enthusiastic teacher. 

Materials decorated in the classroom in Otavalo 

Living in languaging

Languaging in Ecuador

    Although in many textbooks language is presented as the prescriptive knowledge which is pretty stable, I take language as a living thing and a part of my life. This is also what I try to demonstrate to my students, since learning a language is for communicating. Even in contexts where a language is taught for testing or building up social capitals, learners still have to accept the fact that in this era in which information exchanging happens so frequently, they might need to communicate in their second or third language. This is why I would like to define my profession as teaching “languaging” rather than teaching language.

This blog records my development of “languaging.” Although the artifacts are categorized and presented as “products,” I hope you take them as “processes” which are still on-going. For a brief description about my education, professional employment records, and skills please refer to the CV above.

   

Developing Teaching Philosophy: a twisty path more than learning becoming a language teacher

Meeting objectives: 2, 3, 4

    Within these two years, I have written more than one “belief paper” for different courses. Probably, the very first one was the immature SOP starting with a cliché: “I love teaching since I was a child.” Now, I still love teaching, but I have more than just “love” to say. I am going to trace this path of my professional development by reflecting on three belief papers (you can also find them under MA-TESL and TESOL-Ecuador categories) as well as my teaching. Then I will come to the current, but not the final, version of “my belief.”

Worked with students in ESL015

From complex to pseudoconcept

    My identity as a language teacher tied with my identity as an English learner fight against the feeling of inferior. When I wrote my first belief paper, I could not help but relate my goal to “my fighting” by stating “Teaching is an empowering process which enables individuals to change the world, and language teaching is no exception — not because learners get a tool for communication, but they get a new way of thinking.” Although it seemed pretty open-ended to say “a new way of thinking,” the goal I set at that time was almost focused on how to help learners become aware of the power of language. This became my point of departure and my next step was specifying approaches or theories, which, on the one hand can cope with this power issue, and on the other hand, empower learners.

    While decoding my personal literacy development process, I embraced the language socialization paradigm and the Sociocultural Theory in my second belief paper. Although I “knew” them while working on the first paper, I did not know how to apply theories which did not provide specific methods (but then I found this is why SCT can situate flexibly in different contexts). I found SCT perfectly justifies my belief of acknowledging multilingual competence.

My students in Otavalo, Ecuador

Transforming through practices

    The teaching experience in Ecuador was a turning point. The impact of being a total “foreigner,” who had trouble communicating in everyday language, forced me became even humble to understand my students’ struggles. Additionally, through this practice teaching, I realized that I carried a distinct language learning experience from my American colleagues to Ecuador. As an EFL learner, I was more aware of my students’ difficulties, and I knew more strategies to deal with these problems. This was the first time I felt proud about my non-native English speaking background. I then felt relieved that my beliefs and goals were not that far-fetched.

    After I came back to Penn State, I got an opportunity to observe an ESL 015 class and tutored a student. The experience was not that different from the Ecuador’s, but it gave me an insight into ESL student’s struggle of mastering American academic writing. My observation then became a part of my third version of belief paper in which becoming a culturally responsive teacher was put into practices in my reacting toward students’ multilingual competence.

With my tutee from ESL015

Beliefs, developing and apply

        The beliefs below are the forth version of my developing philosophy.  

1.      Situated teaching is should be the first step:

Language teaching should be situated by analyzing sociocultural factors and mediating artifacts in different contexts. Instead of perusing effective teaching and learning as a final product, I take every process as a dialectical move which requires dynamic assessment and giving proper scaffolding.

2.      Transligual competence should be valued

When English become a global language, the understanding toward English learners should also be expended. Teachers should not neglect students’ multilingual competence, but think about how to develop students’ translingual competence. The learning objective should not be “mastering English,” but using both primary languages as well as English to become effective communicator.  

3.          Critical literacy skills toward language and language learning should be encouraged in EFL contexts  

Language teaching should not be limited to teach the language only. This is even true in EFL contexts. Thus, I hope my teaching can bring awareness to “English” and “English learning”: how it is selected, ideologically assigned, and context framed.

APLNG 589 Technology in FL/SL Education

Objectives:1, 2, 5, 7

Download the attached files

       Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) has been wildly applied for decades, not only because of its affordances of long distant learning, but also its providing multimedia interactions. Additionally, according to the Sociocultural Theory, learning happened in interactions. With proper design, technology can be used to scaffold learners according to their ZPD with fewer efforts.

        Aside from an individual final project, there were three mini-projects which students were required to incorporate technology tools introduced in class to design activities for teaching:1) listening, speaking, and pronunciation; 2) reading and vocabulary; 3) grammar and writing. Each design should consider the context, learning objectives and the sustainability. Moreover, designers should also consider how they are going to evaluate the outcome. Through designing mini-projects, I learned how to evaluate the affordances and restrictions of technologies considering specific contexts and theoretical bases.   

The first mini-project was designed for EFL learners with intermediate-high level students in Taiwan (please refer the attached file: mini project 1). We used the Windows Movie Maker to add captions and reflecting questions on a short clip in order to increase listening comprehension.

        The second mini-project was designed for ESL015 students to increase their reading comprehension (please refer to the attached folder—mini project 2). We used an online tool— Hypertext which has a dictionary on half of the screen and give definitions instantly. Also, Wordel and Wordsift were used for incresing effectiveness of reading prediction. Our goal was scaffolding students based on their ZPD accordingly.

Word cloud for pre-reading activity in  mini-project 2

      

      In the third mini-project, our group considered incorporating of both Google Docs and the PBworks (a type of wikis) to facilitate collaborative writing (please refer to the attached folder—mini project 3). We designed a task requiring students to use conditional tense in Spanish to report expecting activities, food and music they would like to explore in a Hispanic festival. By utilizing these tools, our goal is to increase the flexibility of collaborative writing and mutual scaffolding. 
      My final project was a literature review of wiki-based collaborative writing studies (please refer to attached file—final project) .Wikis are Web 2.0 tools providing highly accessible, interactive and flexible collaborative learning experience. In terms of collaborative writing, wikis’ trailing revisions, instant commenting, and co-editing present writing as a process rather than a product. However, although wikis currently draw much attention from educators, wiki-based collaborative wiring research is still in beginning and there is still no framework to ensure every student could on one hand maintain their autonomy, and, on the other hand, participate actively. Thus the review strives to explore possibilities of wikis in future task designing.

My Research

This is an archive for the research projects I did in MA-TESL program. Aside from the brief descriptions below, each of them also has a detailed description in course entries. To understand more about the projects, please feel free to click the quick links of the courses. 

APLNG482 Introduction of Applied Linguistics

Final project

This is a small research investigating two major shifts of “language in education planning” in Taiwan. The project describes the social, historical, and cultural contexts chronically, which aims at finding the cause of current existing language hierarchy in that multilingual society. Through doing this project, I experienced the difficulties of analyzing language issues, but I was also amazed by their complexity. This project raised my awareness toward the political and social factors involved in language teaching.

APLNG581 Discourse Analysis

Final project

This project analyzes how the local and the national scale Tea Party groups constructed their identities and using different promotion strategies to gain public acknowledgments. By using CDA, I understood power issues in language more clearly, and I get a different perspective to relate language to sociopolitical contexts. 

APLNG587 Theory & Research in L2 Teacher Education

Final project

This project first reviews the role of Teacher’s Language Awareness (TLA), and proposes a design of course for teacher education program in Taiwan to develop TLA Because of designing the course, I got a deeper understanding of negotiating the tension between micro-structure and macro-structure.

APLNG589 Technology in FL/SL Education

Finalproject

This review analyzes wiki-based collaborative writing case studies in the five years. The goal is addressing unsolved issues by providing a framework based on the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) in order to add some inputs to wiki-based collaborative writing. When applying the activity theory (which I first learned from APLNG 587), I learned that using technology in language teaching is not simply “adding a tool,” but a “complex interplay between agents, artifacts, and the socio-historical context that weaves resources into a dynamic system of what could be called cultural tools (Lund & Rasmussen, 2008, p.388).

APLNG597A Meaning in L2 Learning

Final project

Using different perspective to analyze the identity construction processes of the Tea Party groups, this project starts from a metaphor analysis in Tea Part groups’ promotion texts and decodes the underlying ideology even further. In this projected I learned how to analyzing metaphorical language and applying it in CDA.

Reference:

Lund, A., & Rasmussen, I. (2008). The right tool for the wrong task? Match and mismatch between first and second stimulus in double stimulation. The International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 3, 387-412.