Lecturer’s Corner News
Renison’s Teaching Award for the 2022-23 Academic Year
During the meeting in September 2023, the Culture and Language Department recognized Dr. Young Gon Kim, a member of RAAS Lecturers’ community, as a recipient of Renison’s Teaching Award for the academic year 2022-23. Overall, this award highlights the accomplishments of Dr. Kim holistically since he was hired in Renison in 1991.
Dr. Kim has had an undeniable impact on the filed of teaching Korean both at and outside this institution. In Renison, he founded the KOREA unit and developed a number of courses for this unit. Over the period of his career in this institution, Dr. Kim’s teaching has been consistently appreciated by his students, both informally and more formally in student Course Perception Surveys (previously known as course evaluation surveys). Other crucial aspects of Dr. Kim’s legacy in Renison have been his mentorship of tutors, focused on sharing teaching strategies and enhancing student engagement, and his contribution to developing EASIA 101R: Learning East Asian Languages, the first plurilingual course in this college and one of few at the national level.
Dr. Kim’s impact outside of Renison can be seen in two aspects: his publications related to teaching Korean and his engagements for the broader Korean teaching community. Some of such publications include the textbook Dr. Kim’s Korean for Complete Beginners as well as journal articles, for instance “The historical survey of Korean language education in Canada,” published in 2005 by Korean Language Education. In addition to that, Dr Kim has meaningfully contributed to the Korean teaching community in his numerous roles, the most prominent of which include those of the President of the Korean Teachers Association in Canada from 1990-1992, a senior advisor to this Association for over 30 years ever since, a member of the Association for Korean Studies in Canada, the International Circle of Korean Linguistics, the International Association for Korean Language Education, the Korean Society of Bilingual Education, the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, and the Korean Writers’ Association of Canada.
The RAAS Lecturers’ community applauds Dr. Kim for all his work and dedication to students and mentored colleagues, and wishes him a wonderful retirement.
Julia Williams and Colleagues Deliver TESL Ontario Webinar
On July 26, 2023, together with her colleagues James Corcoran and Kris Johnston, Julia Williams delivered a TESL Ontario webinar titled EAP Practitioners in Canada. Julia Williams is the Chair of Culture and Language Studies Department and a Continuing Lecturer at Renison University College, James Concoran is an Assistant Professor of English as a Second Language & Applied Linguistics in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at York University, and Kris Johnston is a 6th-year PhD candidate in the Applied Linguistics graduate program at York University.
The webinar summarized two stages of the presenters’ research on English for Academic Purposes (EAP) professionals' lived experiences at various institutions across Canada, including colleges and universities as well as companies offering adult English as a Second Language (ESL) and Language Instruction for Newcomers in Canada (LINC) programs. The conducted survey (n = 481) and interviews (n = 18) included both EAP/ESL practitioners and program managers, and focused on job satisfaction and agency among these groups of professionals. The results showed employment precarity as the most salient differentiator of satisfaction between EAP/ESL directors and instructors. The presenters concluded this seminar with suggestions for policy makers, educators, and instructors, including the importance of further research on material conditions of professionals working in EAP.
Williams, Concoran, and Johnston continue their work on this topic, striving to promote equitable work conditions and an inclusive atmosphere in the workplace for EAP/ESL instructors.
2023 Social Media Day of Action
In the last week of February 2023, RAAS Lecturers joined in the Social Media Day of Action (SM DoA) organized by the OCUFA Contract Faculty Committee (CFC). To express their advocacy for the most precariously employed faculty at RUC as well as across Ontario, the lecturers at this institution met briefly on February 28 and took a picture of their meeting with the OCUFA CFC-designed graphics in the background. (See the picture attached.) In addition to that, Aga Wolczuk interviewed Cindy Zhuang, one of the Definite-term Lecturers at this college, to talk about the aspects of Cindy’s employment she enjoys and appreciates as well as about challenges and concerns related to the precarious nature of definite-term contracts.
You can watch this video here:
To find out how contract faculty participated in SM DoA this year, check the OCUFA’s Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/OCUFA
Thank you,
Aga
Agnieszka (Aga) Wolczuk, OCELT
Continuing Lecturer
FAUW Lecturers Committee Member, RAAS Lecturers Committee Co-chair
Department of Culture and Language Studies
Renison University College, University of Waterloo
Congratulations to Kent Williams
For a paper presentation titled “Using AutoAnalysis to measure fluency and intelligibility gains.”
On October 28, 2022, during the Annual TESL (Teachers of English as a Second Language) Ontario Conference, Kent Williams, a lecturer with English Language Studies at CLS, delivered a paper presentation titled “Using AutoAnalysis to measure fluency and intelligibility gains.” A synopsis of this presentation, based on Kent’s research and teaching practice, is included below.
The purpose of this study was to examine the usefulness (Bachman & Palmer, 1996) of AutoAnalysis for measuring English language learners’ (ELL) gains in fluency (the overall speed and flow of speech) and lexical intelligibility (how well individual words are decoded). AutoAnalysis is an automatic speech recognition tool that is embedded within a learning management system (Bongo/LEARN). AutoAnalysis provides users with transcripts and scores about speech rate (words per minute), fillers (e.g. uh, um, like, well), unclear words (words highlighted as being difficult for the program to process), and an overall score. In this study, 7 advanced-level ELL university students recorded 8 one-to-two-minute speeches into AutoAnalysis as part of a three-month course delivered remotely. Ethics clearance was granted. Three research questions were posed: (1) How reliable are the transcripts and scores? (2) Why are some words ‘mistranscribed’ (i.e. words that are written differently than what the speaker likely intended to pronounce)? and (3) What gains in fluency and intelligibility are shown? To answer the first research question, the researcher manually transcribed 56 speeches (7 participants x 8 speeches), discovering that the automated transcripts were between 81% and 100% accurate depending on the speaker, excluding certain words like names, places, acronyms, and some technical jargon that may be outside of the program’s corpus and therefore, unlikely to be processed accurately. Scores were recalculated based on the manual transcripts and compared with scores based on the automated transcripts. Speech rate was found to be approximately 99% reliable whereas the fillers metric was only about 62% reliable. To answer the second research question, ‘mistranscribed’ words from the automated transcripts were compared with the manual transcripts, revealing that consonant substitution, consonant omission, and vowel substitution were the main causes of the ‘mistranscriptions’ whereas syllable stress differences only seemed to have marginal effects. To answer the third research question, paired samples t-tests from Time 1 to Time 8 were conducted to examine within-subjects differences in speech rate, the amount of speech, and the percentage of ‘clear words’, revealing individualized patterns of development. In particular, statistically significant changes were discovered for the amount of speech produced between Time 1 and Time 8, suggesting that student-participants became more willing to communicate over the course of the semester. Overall, AutoAnalysis has the potential to provide useful information about fluency and intelligibility for research and pedagogical purposes if users are trained to interpret the transcripts and scores critically. Levelt’s (1989) speech production model, Levis’ (2005) Intelligibility Principle, and Bachman and Palmer’s (1996) usefulness framework informed discussions of the findings.
The RAAS LC community applauds Kent’s achievement and wishes him many more successes both in his teaching and in research endeavours!
Congratulations to Yan Li!
The RAAS Lecturers Committee (LC) would like to warmly congratulate Yan Li for her research and publication achievements so far, especially for her work recently recognized with the University of Waterloo President’s Excellence in Teaching and Research 2022 Distinguished Awards and Honours.
A brief excerpt about this distinction from the uW website:
Yan Li
Silk Route Excellent Prose Book Award, Prose Literature Society of Shaanxi Province and Northwestern University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China
"Best Book of the Month" and "Best Book of the Year," Contemporary, People's Publishing House, Writer's Digest, and China Publishing Group Cooperation
For some information about what triggered this research and what the book’s focus is, you can read Yan Li’s explanation below:
On a sunny spring morning a few years ago, I happened to notice a beautiful blooming tree in the Renison garden. The tree was dedicated to Dr. T. A. Bisson, an American scholar who started the Chinese language and culture program at Renison in 1969 and passed away in 1979. My research started, including interviewing his relatives and friends, in Canada and America. My prose, The American Bud on Campus, about the unique life of this famous scholar, was published in a top literature magazine in 2019 in China and aroused great interest. At the request of the publisher, I translated Dr. T. A. Bisson’s book entitled 1937 Talks in Yanan into Chinese and had it launched in 2021. The translated book published together with my prose was a big success, having been listed as the best book of the month by fifteen organizations and also best book of the year by quite a few.
I should express my sincere thanks to my colleagues at CLS and Renison for their genuine support to my research over the years.
Yan Li has been a prolific author throughout her academic career. Her new book The Missing Archives ( 兰台遗卷，non-fiction) will be published by the prestigious China Writers Publishing House in May 2022.
The RAAS LC community is proud of Yan’s achievements and wishes her many more successes both in her teaching and in research endeavours!