Editorial to Issue 13
Welcome to this issue of The Language Scholar. For this editorial I’ve decided to introduce the papers in the context of my personal responses to them, with the caveat that the thoughts expressed here are non-critical and partial, in both senses of the word.
Although the papers in this issue each examine a very different aspects of pedagogy or scholarship (something I found enjoyable in itself), they are all examples of critical, reflective, evidence-based and now public scholarship, and so, I feel are all transformative (See Ding 2016 ‘Challenging scholarship: A thought piece’ in Issue O of The Language Scholar for some discussion on this aspect of scholarship).
In the first piece in this issue, Terry Bradford discusses his ‘experiment’ with live translation events (LTEs), and I found his paper fascinating because for me it combines three things. Firstly, learning about something new, as I didn’t know much about this dynamic and relatively new form of ‘teaching’ event. Secondly, feeling professionally enriched by reading this example of a critically reflective approach to practice that looks at the potential of LTEs both within and beyond pedagogy. Finally, some of Bradford’s key themes - ways of demystifying professional practice, the process of co-construction, and real-world impact – resonated with me as aspects of pedagogy fundamental to my practice in the field of English for Academic purposes.
In the second paper, Catriona Johnson presents her exploratory study of barriers to student participation in peer review workshops. To me, developing practice around student feedback literacy is crucial, and, just as Bradford emphasises the audience as active co-constructors and active agents, so Johnson’s main aim is to develop practice that promotes student engagement and agency. Johnson’s study develops our epistemology in this area in three ways: firstly, as she points out, there isn’t a lot of scholarship in this area that looks at foundation-level pedagogy. Secondly, it evidences the differences between what tutors assume students think and what students really think about feedback. Finally, Johnson gives precise suggestions for improved pedagogy related to each finding in her study and will analyse the impact of this once implemented.
Cuie Xu’s pilot study in the final paper focuses on practitioners and scholarship, examining whether the teaching practices of Korean language scholars in UK HE are linked to both personality traits and workload factors. What interested me most in Xu’s paper was that although the pilot study was small, her methodology was both interesting (for example, she uses a version of the Big Five Inventory that includes questions such as ‘I see myself as someone who has an active imagination’) and rigorous (for example, she constructs correlation matrices), allowing her to discover results that one might expect and others that are contrary to expectations.
I hope you enjoy reading these papers as much as I did.