Drawings as a research tool and a source of data: Advantages and disadvantages in engaging (disadvantaged) children and young people in social science research
   
In this session, I will present drawing as a useful tool to have children and young people actively participate in social science research. Drawing has a long history in social science research, especially in psychology. However, more recently it is employed under the “new paradigm” of childhood (c.f. James and Prout, 1990) which sees children and young people as social actors. In it, drawing is seen to promote research with them, not about them,  facilitating them ‘to construct accounts of their lives in their own terms’ (Holloway and Valentine, 2000, p.8). I will show the advantages of using drawings in research with young participants regardless of their literacy, cognitive, or learning abilities or the context they live in, demonstrating some drawing and related data from a study conducted in post-conflict Sierra Leone. Drawings are simple and familiar artefacts available in any context, and yet they allow young participants communicate abstract concepts that they hold but are difficult to be verbalised. By doing so, they also promote more active engagement of children and young people in research, including those who are disadvantaged.
 
Dr. Mitsuko Matsumoto is an assistant professor at the International University of La Rioja. She is a researcher with training in the field of international education (DPhil, M.Sc. and M.A.) and with experience in qualitative, participatory, visual and multimodal research methodology, focused on children and young people. She currently participates in a European project "Kids' Digital lives in Corona times (KiDiCoTi)" (https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/science-update/kidicoti-kids-digital-lives-covid-19 -times) coordinated by the Joint Research Center of the European Commission. She also collaborates with the Contemporary Childhood, Research Group of the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), and with the new Daisaku Ikeda Mixed University Institute for Research in Education and Development established at the University of Alcalá. Researchgate

From online language resources to fan translation

Language learners use a variety of resources to learn languages, among which are consulting linguistic resources such as online dictionaries or machine translation software when in doubt. The use of these resources may be limited or merely recommended in schools, but the reality is that learners use them extensively in their daily academic and vernacular lives. Especially as regards machine translation, it seems that learners do not usually receive specific training on the use of these resources during compulsory education. The lack of training is perhaps due to a discourse that contradicts the pedagogical value of translation. It is, therefore, in their vernacular practices and outside the classroom that language learners learn, when they do, to use machine translation effectively. These vernacular activities usually have to do with their repertoire of “fan” practices: they want to watch a TV series or a song and they want to understand what is said in another language, or they want to follow the narrative of a game to be able to play and the game has not yet been translated (if it is ever finally translated) to the learner's L1. Sometimes the learners are motivated to translate these games themselves, an activity known as “fan translation”, which covers a niche market and is a sign of affection and passion for the world of video games. In this talk, we will trace research results and procedures from 2012 onwards to explain some of the ways in which young language students learn languages ​​in the wild, in parallel with school practices or even in contradiction to school discourse.


Dr. Boris Vázquez-Calvo is Assistant Professor of Language Education at the University of Malaga, Spain. His current research draws on the interface between language learning, fan practices and digital culture. He is also interested in technology-mediated language learning, in general, video games and their application to education, and the new discursive modalities that emerge or are reconfigured online. His research is available on Research Gate.

New Directions for Instructed SLA?

Second language acquisition researchers interested in supporting language instruction have converged in a subfield known as “instructed SLA.” But the world realities of the 21st century, driven by the pandemic crisis and international and transnational conflict, are transforming disciplinary understandings of “good” language teaching and “successful” language learning at a pace that has perhaps surpassed the traditional interests and research questions of instructed SLA researchers. Certainly, these world realities are also complicating the work of language teachers. In this talk I consider key new directions and inspirations for instruction in second language classrooms that come from engaging with the language and non-language realities of our surrounding world. I explore four themes: the balance between form and meaning in traditional and digital modes of teaching, the ambivalent role of authentic materials and native speaker models, new understandings of multilingual outcomes, and strategies that boost student motivation and linguistic confidence. I argue that we must understand not only the how’s of language instruction but also the why’s. Using the why’s across the four examined themes as a road map, researchers can engage in the tall order to chart new territory for instructed SLA.

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Dr. Lourdes Ortega is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is best known for an award-winning meta-analysis of second language instruction published in 2000, a best-seller graduate-level textbook Understanding Second Language Acquisition (Routledge 2009, translated into Mandarin in 2016), and since 2010 for championing a bilingual and social justice turn in her field of second language acquisition. Recent articles have appeared in CALICO Journal (2017), World Englishes (2018), Modern Language Journal (2019), and Language Learning (2020). Her latest book is The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism (co-edited in 2019 with Annick De Houwer). She is the General Editor of Language Learning. Originally from Cádiz, Spain, Lourdes lived and worked as a language teacher in Greece for most of her 20s. She has lived in the United States since 1993 and has mentored teachers and researchers in Hawaii, Arizona, Georgia, and currently in Washington DC. Lourdes is 1st Vice President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, and in this role she is currently organizing AAAL 2022.

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Publishing in international journals: an editor’s perspectives

In this talk, I will offer my perspectives on a number of steps involved in academic publishing, including journal selection and article preparation. I will also provide insights into the editorial processes in journals and try to give some useful tips to novice researchers and PhD students.  

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Dr. Olcay Sert (Mälardalen University, Sweden) is the editor of Classroom Discourse, an international peer-reviewed journal published by Routledge. His book Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) was shortlisted for the BAAL Book Prize in 2016 and became a finalist for the AAAL first book award in 2017. His work has appeared in a number of academic journals including the Modern Language Journal, TESOL Quarterly, Language and Education, System, and ReCALL. He is the co-editor (w/ Silvia Kunitz and Numa Markee) of Classroom-based conversation analytic research: Theoretical and applied perspectives on pedagogy, published in 2021 by Springer.