The close look at the bibliography has lead me to two authors. TBLT looks at 5 different perspectives, and I have found the sociocultural perspective the most different from the others. So this last week I have been reading Lantolf and authors related. This week the same with Dornyei, and authors related.
So not much more to report on preparation style, except that it includes lots of reading. The exciting part is making the connections, as I fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle. Pretty typical research.
Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.
Someone somewhere, in my grad school era, opined that the most important part of any research book is the bibliography, and if one was short for time, that should come first.
Situating any book in the field is vital to a researcher. A kind of due diligence and critical look at the contents.
Getting the bibliography for this book into a text-readable form took days. Kindle reader (and the publisher) would only let me download a bit at a time. I have used up most of my 10% limit to get the 41 pages of references. I can continue to highlight, the subject of the next post.
Copy and pasting meant the line feeds were not included, meaning huge blocks of text. I spent many a meeting mindlessly finding author names, and adding two line feeds (return key) to format everything (as I listened, of course).
Once in digital forms, we can look at it through a word-cloud, above, which is pretty useless. Below is a list of names and publishers; Ellis, Skehan, Robinson. Swain was surprising, such a strong showing. Dornyei missed a few because of his umlaut. Long established researchers had the advantage here.
The Concepts list is not surprising, except perhaps the low ranking of the word Motivation. You’d think that would be mentioned more often as it is central to language learning. More to explore.
These will help me continue to puzzle out which 2-3 articles to read for each chapter as I progress a second time through the book.
Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.
I showed up at our bi-weekly group intending to discuss a different topic. It turns out many others could not attend this session, so Maria decided to ask me about my iTDi course as part of the Great Minds series. I wish I had prepared a bit, and Sunday night at 10pm lead to some lapses. Apologies. The interview is about the first 20 minutes of this video.
I was able to talk about Great Minds and how it came about, then focus on TBLT, the book, how the research is done, who is not mentioned, how it relates to projects and SLA, and how it fits into language teaching and research. I hope it provides a small window onto the course, but I have yet to get on to the 3rd reading, during which I create the course structure. More about that later.
I promised to mention a book I talked about, but have not read. Task-Based Language Learning in a Real-World Digital Environment. Edited by Paul Seedhouse (2017). More later on this…distraction?
Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.
Once the first reading is finished and I have a feeling for the shape of the book and topic, now is the time to dive deep. I read a chapter and pick out one or two references and access those if I can. Doing this far ahead allows me time to get the articles I want.
The second reading serves more than one purpose, though. I need to fill in the holes, so I build a schema, a background database of interesting facts and conjectures. That means taking lots of notes. Now that I know what a Task is, I can be on the lookout to build a set of sample Tasks that I can use for the third reading (teacher reading).
I start mapping out where information is that will appeal to different types of participants. It will allow flexibility to more research-oriented, or teacher-oriented particpants.
This second reading allows me to create a grounding, look for patterns, find out who and what is more important. I focus on typical practices in both research and teaching.
I develop a taste for the flavor of authors (Ellis, Robinson, Li, etc), how each one writes, thinks, and what they believe. I can also put a perimeter on the topic by noting down what is not there. What about SLA? CALL? Steven Krashen and Beniko Mason? David Nunan?
Reading (Wed 0:32 Ch. 1, Fri 0:56 Ch 2, Sat. 1:13 Ch 3, Thu 1:22 Robinson 2011, Sun 0:55 Long 2014) and Blogging (0:36)
Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.
A faithful historic rendition of the years Thomas Cromwell rises to power first under Cardinal Wolsey, then King Henry VIII. This account is the first of a trilogy, now finished, with the first two winning the Booker Prize. An acclaimed BBC mini-series brings the book even more to life. A story for all ages, reviewed in the Guardian and NYTimes, here a couple of takes on issues at the edge of the story: the printing of books and paper notes.
You get a really good picture of life in 1530s England under Henry VIII and his court with this book. Court politics aside, money and banking aside (both ample topics), we get a glimpse of how the printing press, tied to Luther and Protestantism, is infiltrating and changing England and Europe.
Cardinal Wolsey sees this early on and gains power and wealth by decommissioning monasteries, mostly full of corrupt monks, and using the proceeds to establish colleges at Oxford. You can see the power move from church to university.
When Tyndale translates the Bible into vernacular English, it becomes a target of the King, trying to maintain credit and credibility among the Catholic kings of Europe, to which he is indebted. With his annulment to Katherine, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabelle, things get confusing. But the disruptive nature of books in the hands of regular people is well noted by Cromwell, who tries to manage his fortune around that fact.
The other notable part of this book (for me) is Cromwell’s fascination with the Memory Palace, which he learned in Italy, and commissioned a sort of memory machine by the Italian (Name begins with C), now moved to Paris. He goes on about a box, or chest, with drawers, and drawers within drawers, each with a book in it, and each with more drawers inside, linked from the text to another book. There is an eerie resemblance to Vannevar Bush and his concept of linked texts in As We May Think. Evidently, though, this is an adaptation of a system to remember things, Method of Loci, where lists are remembered by assigning them places, so it is also called a Memory Palace.
I plan to take a short break and start book 2 of the trilogy in about a week, on my daily walks up the hill to the park, then winding down through the cemetery. The audiobook version read by Ben Miles is excellent. Also looking to find a place to watch the BBC mini-series (It’s on Amazon, 4 Episodes, each about 90 minutes).
