Where are you from and what are you studying?

I am currently a second-year MA-TESL student at Northern Arizona University, Arizona, USA.

What is an “a-ha moment” you experienced recently in either teaching or research?

I recently conducted research focusing on high-frequency vocabulary and how it can be instructed in order for students to use it most effectively in their writing. The basis for this research was to investigate whether or not vocabulary terms that appeared frequently in class texts would also appear in student writing without explicit prompting (e.g., You must use five vocabulary words in your response) compared to less frequently occurring vocabulary items. Vocabulary was instructed through a collocation-based model that utilized corpus analysis in the classroom. This method was chosen in order to improve the accuracy of students’ use of vocabulary in general.

In examining student writing, I began to see an interesting trend. I noticed that whenever vocabulary words appeared in writing prompts (e.g., If you had been a slave in 1849, would you have used the Underground Railroad? with both slave and underground railroad being vocabulary words for the unit), these words were the most frequently occurring of any vocabulary terms used in students’ writing. This was not what I had originally set out to examine, but it was such a clear trend that I felt it may be another avenue that could be explored in future research. Could this be another way to encourage vocabulary use in writing without explicitly requiring the use of vocabulary terms in writing? By not explicitly requiring students to include vocabulary in their writing, we may see more natural vocabulary usage, since students feel less pressure to create a sentence for the express purpose of including a word in their writing. I intend to be more careful in my writing prompt creation in the future and will try to incorporate class vocabulary to see if this continues to produce more student use of vocabulary in writing.

What in L2 writing research excites you right now?

I am interested in utilizing corpus analysis to inform teaching practices. I think there are many applications for corpus analysis when it comes to analyzing student writing and seeing how students use language. Not only is corpus analysis a powerful tool that can save time for teachers (provided they have received electronic copies of student writing) when it comes to basic tasks such as checking target vocabulary or grammar, but it can also be utilized to identify some patterns in both individual student writing and class-wide trends. These patterns may not be as apparent from simply reading students’ writing. This can help inform teachers what areas students need to work on, as well as help them identify areas in which their students are excelling, such as using a wide variety of multiword transitions.

Jesse Conway began his ESL/EFL teaching career in 2006 in Japan. He currently teaches EAP as a graduate teaching assistant at NAU’s Program in Intensive English. His research interests include corpus linguistics, international student/NNES advocacy, and world Englishes/English as a Lingua Franca.