Applied Linguistics at KMUTT

Two days ago, I attended a talk by Paul Kei Matsuda, and he said "challenge what you think it's true". I asked him how we could do that given that we all had our own biases, beliefs, persepctives.


So may I ask you a few questions?

Is challenging what you think it's true useful? for what?

How can we challenge our Catch-22 ?

Challenging what you think is true is just another way of saying that you should be a critical thinker. We should always be challenging our biases, our beliefs, and our perspectives. Otherwise, we will never understand anyone with a different thought or opinion from ourselves.

Whenever this topic comes up, I am reminded of when I was in high school and my best friend told me his new philosophy of life was to “Question Everything”. I thought he was crazy, but he had a great point. I now believe that we should not just accept what we are given/taught as true without question. We should also be willing to accept that what we believe is not always true. What we believe is not always right.

Easier said than done, though.

This sounds similar to the need to be aware of your assumptions, and then presumably challenge them. When I teach research methods, I argue that researchers need to be aware of their assumptions and that this is probably the most difficult thing to do in research. The idea applies more generally though.

We can also become aware of our assumptions and challenge them in teaching. Recent challenges include:
Teaching happens in classrooms - in the last 20 years this has become a clearly challenged assumption with teaching happening online and in communities as well as in classrooms.
Teaching is organised by courses - the university is challenging this with the idea of microcredentials (i.e. students should now be able to do something small for 0.5 credits, rather than the traditional 3-credit courses that dominated previously).
Language teaching involves language objectives - we're challenging this with a new course that we're hoping to pilot where all the objectives are experiential.

A nice example of this is Allwright (1989) How Important are Lessons, Anyway? Lancaster-Leeds Language Learning in Large Classes Research Project Report No. 12. His starting point was to investigate how class size affected learning, concluding that it doesn't seem to be a very important variable in student language learning. Rather than stopping there, he went on to suggest that lessons themselves are not important.

As some of you might know, during the Language Department meeting last week, a few of us started an "Innovative Curriculum" group that will be investigating how we can innovatively improve all of our English courses at KMUTT. We definitely want to "challenge what we think is true" about classroom education, so the article that Richard cited is a great place for us to start. It's a short but very thought-provoking read, and so I highly recommend it to everyone. It can be downloaded for free from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED326065.

Thank you for sharing your ideas.

Richard wrote:Teaching is organised by courses - the university is challenging this with the idea of microcredentials (i.e. students should now be able to do something small for 0.5 credits, rather than the traditional 3-credit courses that dominated previously).
Language teaching involves language objectives - we're challenging this with a new course that we're hoping to pilot where all the objectives are experiential.

This is really interesting. Looking forward to seeing this innovative way of teaching and learning (and perhaps also assessment).

sgtowns wrote:As some of you might know, during the Language Department meeting last week, a few of us started an "Innovative Curriculum" group that will be investigating how we can innovatively improve all of our English courses at KMUTT. We definitely want to "challenge what we think is true" about classroom education, so the article that Richard cited is a great place for us to start. It's a short but very thought-provoking read, and so I highly recommend it to everyone. It can be downloaded for free from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED326065.

I just finished reading the paper, and reflect on my experience when I taught one GEN ED course (about 100 students) 4-5 years ago . I do think the class size does matter. In a large class, it is difficult for a teacher to pay attention to all the students. Opportunities for a teacher to interact with all the students are also reduced. It could also be more scary for a student to share ideas in a large class (think about when you are in a small group meeting and a large group meeting). Incidental learning may rarely happen as the students may be distracted by their friends (it is more tempting and fun to talk with friends).


Lessons are important. Lessons could be a starting point to inspire students to explore or learn more about English. Lessons allow students opportunities to use English as they may not find someone else to use English with (think about students in a remote area in Thailand).
The importance of lessons cannot be undermined. However, what to be included in a lesson is another issue and may be questionable.

We are getting a bit off-topic (which is not necessarily bad), but I wanted to follow up on Woravut's comments:

Woravut wrote:I do think the class size does matter. In a large class, it is difficult for a teacher to pay attention to all the students.

It certainly makes sense from the teacher's perspective that large class sizes have a negative effect. The was a study published in 2012 entitled "The effects of class size on English learning at a Thai university" which found that class size does indeed have a negative correlation with student grades -- the larger the class, the worse the grades. As the paper points out, grades don't necessarily mean learning, but it's at least something to back up your ideas. If anyone is interested in reading more, the paper can be found at https://dergipark.org.tr/download/article-file/63598

Woravut wrote:It could also be more scary for a student to share ideas in a large class (think about when you are in a small group meeting and a large group meeting).

This is a great point as well. A study on English learners in Hong Kong in 2012 found that "Students reported that smaller classes promoted a strong sense of security within their classroom community and seemed to weaken students’ fears of negative evaluation from their peers and teachers. Students also reported that they felt more confident about participating in English lessons and these perspectives were supported by evidence from classroom observations." For further reading, this paper can be found at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/37973683.pdf

And to get back on the original topic, if you challenge what you think is true, even though you might not change your mind in the end, you might still learn something new from the experience.

Woravut wrote:

Richard wrote:Teaching is organised by courses - the university is challenging this with the idea of microcredentials (i.e. students should now be able to do something small for 0.5 credits, rather than the traditional 3-credit courses that dominated previously).
Language teaching involves language objectives - we're challenging this with a new course that we're hoping to pilot where all the objectives are experiential.

This is really interesting. Looking forward to seeing this innovative way of teaching and learning (and perhaps also assessment).

I took this from one of the PPT (A new methodology for Thailand, presented by Aj. Richard in 2006)
1980s and 1990s: move towards CLT
1999: National Education Act
1990s-present: use of standards
1990s: use of self-access in universities
2000s: use of task-based teaching and e-learning in universities
2004: use of self-access in secondary schools


NOW 2019: ?????