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A back story

 

When I began my MSc at Oxford in 2015, I never thought my journey would take me to a DPhil, and never imagined that if it did, it would be in the developmental trajectory of listening. Still, the presentation of a single study – Graham & Macaro (2008) – peaked my interest as I saw the relevance of the research questions to my own context as a teacher of French in an English secondary school. A Master’s dissertation about the experiences of listening to French as a lower intermediate English learner (Simpson, 2017) showed me the excitement of trying to grasp what happens in the listener’s mind when they hear French, with all the intriguing nuances that this brings.

A rainy evening in the university library at the start of my DPhil. The full-time students have long since gone home, and another paper captures my imagination. For practical reasons I am doing the DPhil part-time, and continuing to work, and want to make a virtue of my part-time status by looking at the progress of listening over as long as possible. While reading around longitudinal research, I come across Larsen-Freeman (2006) which simultaneously introduces me to Complex Dynamic Systems Theory and brings alive four case studies, telling a story of their learning which inspires me on an academic and a professional level. As a teacher I had often been left feeling frustrated with research which presented two variables: one dependent and one independent, as I knew instinctively that learning was not that simple. Complexity made much more intuitive sense as I knew the myriad ways in which my own students’ learning was impacted. Putting these two ideas together, the present study was born.

Working on the thesis was a labour of love over nearly seven years. It has been exciting, frightening, surprising, motivating, upsetting, challenging but never boring. It astonishes me that the project is now over. This blog is an attempt to turn the academic thesis into something that makes sense to teachers. It steps out of the ivory towers and Oxford's dreaming spires, and into the messy reality of a typical languages classroom. 


References: 

Graham, S., & Macaro, E. (2008). Strategy instruction in listening for low-intermediate learners of French. Language Learning, 58(4), 7470783.

Larsen-Freeman, D. (2006). The emergence of complexity, fluency, and accuracy in the oral and written production of five Chinese learners of english. Applied Linguistics, 27(4), 590–619. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/aml029

Simpson, K. (2017). Can speech stream segmentation instruction improve listening comprehension and listening self-efficacy in lower intermediate learners? Oxford. available here: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2fff1b50-db92-44db-bb00-b8f908685f8b


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