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.