Catching up

Unfortunately, the dissertation was so time consuming, that since I went back to work full-time on it I had no time to document the process. Now, a few days after the defence, I can write a few lines on that.

Writing the results was a real challenge. I thought an undergraduate dissertation wouldn't give me a chance to feel the water coming up over my neck, but I was wrong. The results were hard for many reasons. On the one hand, they brought the evidence of mistakes in the methodology. I had noticed some while I gathered my data, and managed to fix a few in time; but some others were unforeseeable to me at that time, and "emerged" like ugly warts when I did my data analysis. This is absolutely normal, because this dissertation was my first piece of empirical research ever, and I knew hardly anything about research methods in the field. So, by the time I was close to the end of the dissertation, I knew enough to spot my mistakes (some of them, because I still don't know enough to discover others, I am sure), but nothing could be done to fix them. As a result, there was this "moment of panic" weekend, where I was thinking "oh, my god, this doesn't make any sense!".

The other difficult part of dealing with the results was the fact that I analysed my data from every angle I could think of, and there was a moment when the results were far too many to map in my mind. It took me some days to select the relevant results and construct a story that made some sense with them. Because, at the end of the day, a dissertation is a story; a narration telling that you started off with a sound knowledge on your research topic, you discovered the niche you wanted to occupy in the field of your research, you carefully thought of how you were going to solve the riddles you had in your mind, you went out and proceeded exactly as planned, you analysed your data according to the plan, and you reached your conclusions afterwards. And, well, my dissertation didn't follow a linear path like that. It wasn't a complete mess, but it wasn't exactly as I told it. And I suspect that is true for many other pieces of research, at least among the less experienced like myself.

And, then, the results seemed to go on and on. I had to do a crash course on statistical analysis on the go, which didn't help speed up the work, either. The whole month of May I sat in front of the computer writing the results, and at one moment I thought I wouldn't be able to make it on time, because I didn't want to rush and end up producing something I wasn't happy with. Even if I had tried to be very concise, the methodology and results chapters were long, and my text ended up being a few thousand characters over the limit. Therefore, I had to leave out a whole subsection of the results, and cut as much as I could from the rest.

Another difficult aspect of the dissertation was the extensive reading I had to do in order to cover the topics chosen. When I narrowed down my research topic to autobiographical storytelling, I thought I was going to be fine. Although storytelling is a very wide topic, personal narrative is a manageable sub-category, and I believed I was safe after I chose it. The problem is that the sort of variables I decided to analyse (comprehension, motivation, engagement) belong to very wide research topics in language learning, and it was difficult to learn enough about them in the seven months I spent working on the dissertation. I believe that the most interesting results of the project actually came from the analysis of how those variables interacted among each other, but I pushed myself very close to my limit.

I was also lucky during the process, because some of the decisions I took in the early stages, particularly when I made my experimental design, turned out well, even if I didn't know enough about what I was doing at the time. For example, I decided that I should have different sources of data, like a questionnaire and video recordings. It seemed common sense to me at the time to have additional sources of information to study if one of them went wrong because I had designed it badly, or something went wrong during the activities. I had to take those decisions in January, when I hadn't finished all my reading, and I didn't know enough about research methods in social sciences. Later on I learned that what I called common sense was actually called triangulation in the social sciences. To be completely honest, I think that this sort of luck is the one that goes together with sweat, but chance was partly involved in the results, and it happened to be on my side.

Of course, not all (good and bad) was due to myself and to luck. As for the good, I received a lot of help from others, some known and some unknown. My dissertation and school placement supervisors gave me very useful advice and proofread the document, giving me very valuable feedback. All the teachers in the units of this last year focused on the dissertation, and how they could help us improve our skills to do better through the assignments for their units. The rest of my teachers during the degree have also helped me greatly during the four years, so I could construct my personal map of what education is, and gave me opportunities to train the skills needed to complete the undergraduate dissertation. And, of course, in a degree where most units are based on group work and collective assignments, whatever I have learned was always with the help of my classmates and group-mates. The undergraduate dissertation is an individual piece of work in the last year of your degree, but the resources you use to complete it have been shaped during the previous years in the interaction with others. Well, at least that is the way I have grown to see what learning is, within Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of learning. Internet, on the other hand, gave me the chance to access guidelines and advice on how to tackle an undergraduate dissertation, and that was of great help too.

On the other hand, I decided to go for a formal poster design that would match the general tone of the dissertation, and that made it very easy to prepare. It would have been nice to experiment with more exciting layouts, but considering that my timing was tight, I think I made the right decision.

Finally, regarding computer problems, I was extremely lucky. My computer decided to crash during one of those operating system automatic updates, but thankfully that was two days after I had handed in the final versions of the dissertation and the poster. I spent two days recovering the original OS, updating it manually and recovering some software such as the browser and its plugins and addons,  which are essential to open the dissertation document. Honestly, I can't imagine what it would have been like if it had happened a week before.

So, in summary, I think that the undergraduate dissertation has been a very good addition to the degree. It gives you the opportunity to learn new things compared to the rest of units in the degree, and it is of great help to build the researching teacher profile that our university wants to promote, which happens to be the profile I like the most myself. After completing an undergraduate research project, teachers are likely to be better prepared to take part in research projects in collaboration with university researchers and other teachers, and I think that will help improve education in the long run.

Back on the road

I finished with all the assignments, and now I only have the dissertation left. I have been dreading the moment when everything else but the dissertation was finished. I thought I had probably forgotten where I had left it two months ago, as well as the contents of all the articles I had read.

But today I just couldn't delay it anymore, and I went back to writing. It was actually a nice surprise to see that I remembered the only small bit I had left without finishing in the methodology chapter, and I found the articles I needed for that immediately (good thing I had classified the articles in topics that made sense to me). It turns out my old brain is not as bad as I thought.

Now I "just" have to write the results and the conclusions, and go back to the literature review and fix it. And I have four weeks left until I hand in my final draft and the poster. And after that, a couple of weeks more to present the poster and have the oral defence. I prefer to think it's going to be a piece of cake!

Whom is your text suitable for?

During the degree and the Minor, we have often discussed how important it is to use texts suited for the audience we intend to reach. I have come across a tool that can help in this sense, a website named "Analyze my writing", which gives a set of readability scores for any sample text you copy and paste into it. It offers details about the readability indices it includes and is very easy to use.

I have given it a try with a quite informal text for my self-assessment on a unit in the Minor, the autobiographical story I told a group of fourth-graders during the school placement, and with a sample from my dissertation, and the scores are quite different.

I think it can be useful to test the difficulty level of texts before taking them to the English class, as well as to check that we are producing the right type of texts for our most formal assignments, like the dissertation.

Dissertation, what's that?

I have hardly touched my dissertation since we went back to our university lessons back in February. It's been almost two months now.

I am not terribly worried yet, but I need to get back to it as soon as I can. I am finishing off some last assignments now, and once I get that out of the way I will take out the piles of articles and books again.

This long break has some advantages and disadvantages. I will need to re-read many of the articles, because they are not fresh in my mind any more, which is a bit of a pain. That's the worst part. The good side is that I should be able to have a more objective view on what I have done so far, which is also dangerous, because I might decide to change many things. All in all, I think the break will be for the better, because having finished too early would have made me forget what it was all about by the time I had to present it, and it would have been much harder to maintain the tension I still need to keep until the end of June.

Right now, my body and a good part of my mind want to rest, believe it's all done, and relax. But this is not over yet, and I need to continue thinking day by day for another two months. And regarding the dissertation presentation, our last group presentation of the term reminded me that I need to hope (and work hard) for the best, but prepare myself for the worst at the same time. So, yes, there is plenty of work ahead.

Slowly, but ahead with my dissertation

I haven't mentioned anything on my dissertation in a long time now. I would like to write more on my blog but I just don't seem to be able to find time to do so. Cheap excuse; I know.

Well, about my dissertation, I have to say that I was quite pleased with the result achieved up to the end of my school placement. I didn't manage to finish all that I had hoped (produce the final draft of the whole document), but I knew my objective was far too optimistic. By the time we went back to our university lessons, I had written the theoretical part, collected my data and written down the chapter on methodology. At the same time, after having reached that point, I realised I would need to re-write part of my theoretical chapter, as the readings on the topic of the dissertation had lead me to aspects I couldn't anticipate when I started my writing.

After having gone back to our lessons, I have hardly touched the dissertation, I must admit, because I use all the time I have for other assignments. Still, I have to admit that I am not worried; as a matter of fact, I think that finishing the dissertation too early could be a bad idea. The presentation will take place in June, and I think it is better to have the contents as fresh as I possibly can in my head, so if I were to finish my final draft in March or early April, it would be way too early.

I plan on using my Easter holidays to write the results, and start with the conclusions. After that, when we finish our lessons, I should have more time to polish it and send it to my supervisor for the last feedback.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Stacks of articles arranged by topics, books, computer... that is my week-end life during the months of writing the dissertation.

Hop on the roller-coaster!

Remember I said that maybe an undergraduate dissertation was not going to be tough or long enough to feel like walking through a desert? Well, guess what, I was wrong!!

It's a good thing I wrote about how happy I was with how things were coming out and how hard I had worked over Christmas on Thursday morning, because I turned upside down that very same afternoon, after I received a message from my trainee placement supervisor telling me that I was missing some fundamental points and sending me some relevant literature which made my knees tremble, because the minute I read the abstracts I knew they were those kind of articles where I can only get a grasp of maybe 20% of what is being said.

That takes me to an interesting point as a teacher trainee, as I got to experience myself the kind of feeling that children can sometimes have if you don't plan your lessons properly: plain stupidity. I don't mean ignorance, which is ok. Knowing yourself ignorant is normal; there are so many things to learn in the world and in life that nobody can be expected to know them all, and if you walk out of your comfort zone you are bound to feel ignorant. As a teacher, you can help students use this self-consciousness about ignorance as a pole to learn, instead of a spade to dig their self-esteem in deep hole.

But feeling stupid is quite something else; that's the kind of feeling you get when you are put in a position where what you are expected to understand or to learn is way ahead of you, when the gap between what you already know and what you intend to learn is simply too big and you don't find enough help around you to bridge it. During the degree we have learnt the technical terms related to these questions (zone of proximal development, scaffolding), as well as some of their deeper implications, but the basic idea can be explained in plain words.

During the degree, I have come to realise that teachers know a bit about many fields (psychology, sociology, linguistics etc.) and they apply that knowledge to real situations of learning and teaching in a school. Knowing just a bit about those subjects means that they can only go so far into the details of each field, or they need to take some time to study them in more depth before going any further. That is where the readings that help bridge the gap come in so handy, otherwise you just get caught up in jargon.

Coming back to my roller-coaster of emotions related to the dissertation, it has given me an opportunity to laugh at myself a bit and to reflect on what will most probably happen when I defend my dissertation in front of the committee in some months. My work will be read by (I think) three of our lecturers, who are experts in their fields, and they are bound to ask questions and make remarks based on their knowledge, which I lack. So, I'll have to bear in mind that the purpose of the whole thing will be for me to know what I know about and what I am ignorant about, just that.

And one last thing about this final idea: I have seen that in some other universities, the poster sessions on undergraduate dissertations are held weeks before the written report is to be submitted. In my opinion, that makes a lot of sense, especially from the point of view of assessment. Having the oral defense and poster session in the end, weeks after the written report has been handed in actually turns these two tasks into final assessment tools, whereas if the poster session is held during the process of producing the dissertation, it fits much better in the continuous assessment we are supposed to have. That would also help improve our work, as we would get very useful feedback on our work in a moment when we can actually still change things.

Working on my undergraduate dissertation over Christmas

I am really happy with all I managed to get done over Christmas on my undergraduate dissertation. I did an awful lot of reading, and quite a lot of writing too, so the objectives I set before the holidays were met. I kept the writing as concise as I could, because I want to leave space for extending on those aspects that will be more important regarding the empirical part of the work, which I have outlined, but not fully developed yet.

As a result, I have a draft with the final structure of the document, and some sections have a large part of the contents already written. Not all that needs to go in has been written yet, but all that has been written is there to stay (with minor changes, of course).

Meanwhile, I continue gathering more and more literature, which is something that will eventually need to stop, because I won't have time to go over all of it. The problem is that the more I go into details, the more I feel I need to know, so I continue searching, and when you search, you always find interesting things. For instance, I plan on doing a storytelling and assessing the listening comprehension in students. Then, of course, I realise that my choice of questions will need to be well justified, so I begin to look for information on how to assess listening comprehension, which is not the topic of my dissertation, but nevertheless I need to have a fair idea on it. Everything I think about leads me to the need to know more about other related topics, which takes me to more and more readings, even if I think I have narrowed down the topic of my dissertation. I don't know, maybe I am doing something wrong; or maybe that is the way it should be.

Anyway, at the end of the day, this is an undergraduate dissertation, mainly a chance for me to learn, and not so much to prove that I know thoroughly my way around researching and the scientific method. I am learning a lot of things, so I think I am heading in the right direction, and hopefully with the help of my supervisors for the dissertation and the school placement I'll get there.

Progress on my undergraduate dissertation

This past week, since we were doing Christmas decorations at school and I wasn't going to miss anything crucial, I took a day off to gather material for my dissertation and have a meeting with my school placement supervisor.

I had already collected quite a number of papers from the ERIC database before that, and the visit to both Habe's and EHU's libraries gave me a chance to collect some books on the subject. I will need to go to our university library next week to pick up some books I ordered to be borrowed from another campus, but other than that, I am quite set. Actually, I have too much to read and process for such a short dissertation (the theoretical part shouldn't take more than 12 pages).

The meeting with my school placement supervisor was also great. Having to submit drafts, extended abstracts or setting appointments is a great way to push yourself to do things. It helps you clarify ideas before you actually write or have the meeting, and it allows you to receive precious feedback from people that know more than you on the topic.

I presented my school placement supervisor the three possible topics I have chosen for the practical part of my dissertation, and I took some papers about them with me:

• Analysing the theoretical background of Artigal and Eleanitz regarding the treatment of storytelling (why is it performed first without visual support, and so forth), and coming up with a list of indicators that would allow me to measure if the objectives set in those methods are actually accomplished in the classroom. Since I have permission to videotape, this would be feasible.
• Testing the autobiographical story in the classroom, to analyse the level of engagement as opposed to "regular stories" used in Eleanitz. This would be an idea for the fourth grade of primary, since I have noticed that they are very interested in telling stories about themselves and listening to personal stories of others. I would also need to select indicators of students' (and teacher's?) level of engagement for this, and equally tape the lesson.
• Testing the use of the autobiographical story as a means for teaching improvement. This would be done together with my co-reader of the school placement diary, if she agreed to it, of course. The problem with this proposal is that I would have no way to test if teaching were actually improved, because we are not teachers, and we would not be able to maintain the exercise long enough (in the literature, these sort of activities are held over months or a whole academic year). So, it would just be a matter of testing the resource and assessing how we felt performing it.

We discussed them for quite long, and my supervisor advised me that the first choice was probably the most useful and suitable from the university's point of view. We also agreed that trying to do the three would be far too much. Finally, my supervisor asked me to produce an extended abstract of the three options, which will help me decide which is the most suitable. So, that's what I will do as soon as I get enough reading done. Nevertheless, I know myself, and I am sure that consciously or unconsciously I will try to think of a way to somehow combine these three options into something that will make sense, because I absolutely hate to give up interesting things, and the three of them are.

As a final note to myself, I should consider the possibility of having two supervisors for my undergraduate dissertations, because it seems my school placement supervisor is also going to be involved in my dissertation, so it would only be fair to acknowledge that. There will be ample time for that, but I need to bear it in mind.

Fifth week of my school placement

This week is being more relaxed, as the LH1 and LH2 groups finished all their lessons, and the HH4 and HH5 groups too. So, we have been doing Christmas decorations, and watching Christmas films, like the Smurfs’ version of A Christmas Carol. Having that in mind, I spent all day out yesterday, visiting Habe’s library, the EHU’s library and having a meeting with my university tutor for the school placement. That way, I collected a few more books on my undergraduate dissertation and got to know Habe’s library, which I found really nice and full of interesting things.

Earlier in the week I wrote on my blog about some problems in my interactions with children. At the end of the day, in all my school placements my struggles are always around the most basic aspects of teaching, which have to do with relationships, communication, understanding, negotiating, connecting. In summary, I am mostly interested on what the teacher can do to create the conditions under which learning can occur. The didactics of subjects (maths, science, English…) don’t really worry me that much; I think they are easier to acquire. It is the other part of being a teacher that I am most concerned about.

Well, and now back to what I had planned to write about. Before I started my school placement, I knew I would enjoy being with pre-primary children, because that is what our degree is about. I also thought that I would find primary students a bit of a pain in the rear end, being pre-adolescents trying to find any crack that could enable them to challenge you. But it turned out I really enjoy being with them. I don’t see that much of a difference between pre-primary students and the students of the first two primary grades, but there is quite a gap between those and the fourth graders. Fourth graders are more mature and more interested in the world, and others; they reason in a different way, and the interaction with them resembles more what you could have with adults, in some senses. They are more interested in socialising and all that goes with it, and I find them very interesting. I am experiencing the reason behind the set up of the stage into three cycles (P1-2, P3-4, P5-6), and I like it. I haven’t had a chance to visit the 5th and 6th grades yet, because I hate to leave out any of the other lessons in order to attend those, but I am sure I would see another big gap between the fourth graders and these last two as well.

I will finish the week full of homework for the holidays. In these last weeks, I have downloaded all the Eleanitz material, copied the Artigal CDs and DVDs, and during the holidays I will study the new lessons we will start in HH4, HH5, LH1, LH2 and LH4 in January. That means reading the teacher’s guides, the stories, listening to the songs and rhymes, watching the performance videos and reading the activities which we will be doing during the first six weeks of the term (each unit takes around six weeks to complete). I will also need to write a final draft of the theoretical part of my undergraduate dissertation and design the practical part of it, so I can put it into practice after the holidays. It seems like an awful lot of work to do! We’ll see how much I get accomplished.

Fourth week of my school placement

This is being a short week too, because there was no school on Monday. Christmas is approaching, and there is a different atmosphere, even if we haven’t started making Christmas decorations and things like that yet.

This week the LH1 and LH2 groups have been doing extra things, because they finished their units last week. The teacher told the LH1 group a story about a little pig, and we have done a booklet of the story and a pig’s mask during the week. The story itself was quite poor, as a story, in my opinion; just a “sugar coating” to review some vocabulary. It was about a little pig who cried on its way home because it didn’t know where its mummy was. It gets in the house and asks “mummy, where are you?”. The mummy answers that in the living room, watching tv. Then, the little pig asks again, and the mummy says that in the kitchen, getting supper ready. Then it is the mummy who asks where the little pig is, who says that in the bathroom, taking a bath. Then the mummy asks again, and the little pig answers that it is in the bedroom, reading. And the last time the mummy asks the little pig doesn’t answer because it is asleep, so the mummy says good night. Even if the story was so bad, children quite enjoyed it, so maybe it was only bad to my eyes. Well, some of them complained when the teacher told the story again today, for the third time, this time with their help.

The LH2 group watched a video on Tuesday, and we will see what we will do today.

Well, I will do as I said last week, and write on the ideas for the practical part of my undergraduate dissertation. I have come to the conclusion that it won’t be possible to propose something out of the blue which will interfere with the lesson planning that has already been set, so I need to think on something that I can use and will be done within the normal lessons. I thought that I would like to know what kind of way to tell the story would engage students the most, assuming that some ways would be more appealing to them than others. So far, I have seen teachers tell stories in different ways in LH: dramatising small parts of the story together with a small group of students, playing a CD with a native speaker reading the story, having students read the story taking turns and using large images with a text stuck in the back from where the teacher can partly read. In HH, we have told the story in different ways too: with the teacher dramatising all roles and students repeating the dialogue of each character, using a poster with stickers for the characters that each student would move as the story unfolded and using a booklet with the story as the guide to tell the story.

My teacher has told me that when they start a new unit, the story is always told with no visual support first, dramatising it together with the whole group. The next times when the story is told they begin to introduce some visual material.

I talked to my school tutor about the practical part of the dissertation I am supposed to do, and we concluded that maybe I could do some research on the reasons behind the ways the story is told in this particular methodology, together with the goals pursued, and analyse if we fulfill those goals in our class. It doesn’t sound absolutely thrilling, but it is feasible. So, I will do some literature research on the Artigal and Eleanitz methods regarding the theoretical background behind the way in which stories are told. I have almost finished reading the teacher’s guide for Artigal, and there isn’t that much I can get out of it, so I will try to find specific articles on the subject.

If I manage to get relevant information, I will concentrate on that and start gathering data when we start working on the new units after Christmas. I might leave out the LH4 group, and attend the lessons of more than one group in the LH1, LH2, HH4 and HH5 grades, so I can watch how the teacher tells the story to one group, and do it myself with another group.

Next week I would like to return to more general aspects, and talk a bit on my expectations before I started the school placement regarding the LH stage, and what reality has taught me. In summary, I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy the LH lessons much, because I thought I liked younger children better for teaching, but it turns out I am really enjoying the LH classes, especially LH4. All grades are very different, but there are reasons to enjoy the experience in all of them, I have found.

Not much tell, I am afraid

This has been one of those weeks when you doubt whether you should write anything on the progress of the undergraduate dissertation; "what for? I didn't get anything done".

Nevertheless, since I intend to document the progress, I think it is important to reflect those days which feel foggy as well. Maybe the undergraduate dissertation won't be long and demanding enough for those long days of walking in a desert that others experience, but it has its ups and downs, like any other project, and not getting lost in them is an important learning which one is supposed to gain along the process.

This week I intended to have put together in my Zotero dissertation folder all the literature we have gathered on storytelling during the degree, which is a lot, by the way. I started using Zotero on my first year in the degree, and I organise my references in folders created per assignment or unit, so I need to go through all of them to pick the relevant ones. Plus, some teachers gave us articles and chapters of books which I didn't have to use in any assignment and have not been added to my Zotero library yet, so I need to go over my paper folders too.

Well, that was my intention, but I haven't been able to do it; not even in a week where the weekend stretched thanks to a bank holiday today. I guess my health is getting to its limit after having gone through the first three years of the degree and this year it is causing me more trouble than I am used to, so this week has been about a cold and back ache. Spending seven months a year leaving home at 7.20 am and returning at 9.00 pm and sitting down in front of the computer most of the weekend can't be good, especially once you turn 45! The good news is there is only a few months of that left.

Coming back to the dissertation, I have also been doing quite a lot of thinking, but that doesn't show up unless you use a resource like this blog, and that is one of the reasons why I like it so much. I have been thinking about aspects linked with my dissertation topic (storytelling) on which I would like to conduct the practical part of my dissertation (a small research project). The problem is that all the alternatives I have thought about (I don't have time to explain them now, but I will later on) don't seem feasible, taking into account the set up of the English lessons in the school where I am doing my placement. So I feel a bit frustrated, because the sort of things which might be feasible don't look too appealing to me, and the things I am curious about,I can't see how they could be done. I will talk about them with my school placement tutors, both at school and at university, and with classmates, if I can, to see if anyone can give me interesting ideas.

For this coming week, I will print out the abstracts of all the articles I have gathered so far, and read them in order to start narrowing down the topic. That will help me cheer up, since it is a task where I am bound to succeed, as it is just a matter of reading. If I manage to do that and finish putting together the rest of the literature this coming week (meaning next weekend), I can leave the visit to the two libraries for the other week and be all set to spend Christmas doing some intense reading and writing!

Storytelling vs. using stories

This week I have also been thinking about the question that my school placement tutor posed when we last met: what is storytelling?

I will use a couple of quotes from Daniel Pennac's book Como una novela to summarise what I have come up with as an answer:

El verbo leer no soporta el imperativo. Aversión que comparte con otros verbos: el verbo "amar"..., el verbo "soñar"...
Claro que siempre se puede intentar. Adelante: ¡Ámame! ¡Sueña! ¡Lee! ¡Lee! ¡Pero lee de una vez, te ordeno que leas, caramba!

If that wasn't clear enough:

Sin saberlo, descubríamos una de las funciones esenciales del cuento, y, más ampliamente, del arte en general, que consiste en imponer una tregua al combate de los hombres.
El amor adquiría allí una piel nueva.
Era gratuito.
Gratuito. Así es como él lo entendía. Un regalo. Un momento fuera de los momentos. Incondicional. [...]
Como precio de este viaje, no se le pedía nada, ni un céntimo, no se le exigía la menor contrapartida. Ni siquiera era un premio. (¡Ah, los premios..., los premios había que ganárselos!) Aquí, todo ocurría en el país de la gratuidad.
La gratuidad, que es la única moneda del arte.

So that is storytelling, and using stories for educational purposes is something else.

I guess my undergraduate dissertation will deal with the use of stories to teach foreign languages, especially English. What a bummer!

Continuing gathering literature

This week I have continued gathering recent articles that might be useful for my undergraduate dissertation. I must admit that some of the articles that have attracted my attention are not specifically on using storytelling in the English classroom. For example, I have been reading very interesting things on the use of the teacher's autobiography to teach English as a second language, on case studies about the use of bilingual narratives in the acquisition of English as a second language and about trilingualism.

Honestly, I don't know how these things will fit into my dissertation, but I believe that letting myself wander off a bit is good. At the end of the day, mixing the top-bottom and the bottom-up approach can be useful in the dissertation, at least the way I see it. By that I mean that not only do I have to look for literature on the topic of my dissertation, but also find links between things that apparently are not strictly linked to my topic but have caught my eye and my dissertation.

After I finish looking for journal articles, I will go to both the university's and HABE's libraries to look for books on my topic. And when I do that, I think I will be ready to start reading and writing. I will most probably need to do some more literature search after I start reading, but it will most probably be more specific.

From what I have seen so far, there seems to be an awful lot going on around digital storytelling, which doesn't look too appealing to me, to be honest. Besides, during my school placement it doesn't look like I'll have many chances to go into that. So, I'll have to see if I get into digital storytelling or I skip it altogether.

First small steps in my undergraduate dissertation (GRAL)

At the beginning of the term, we chose the topic and our GRAL tutor, and after that we got tangled in assignments and regular coursework. As a result, I haven't been able to do anything on my GRAL until this week, when after having finished this term's lessons we started our third school placement.

So far, I have read the GRAL guide again; I have read a bit of the website our teachers have created to give us support to do our dissertation; I have begun to create my document template for the dissertation (our GRAL tutor provided us with one, but since I am used to creating my own, I rather do it from scratch), downloaded the university logo and read about the university's typo (I wonder if we will be allowed to use it, as it is not mentioned in the GRAL guide); I have also installed the application which will allow me to search in our university's databases from my computer at home, something that I hadn't done in my new computer yet; and have searched on my topic in the ERIC database.

The most interesting things I found in the GRAL guide, besides the specifications for the written report and the poster of my future dissertation, were these two:

• One or more questions should be the starting point for the dissertation.
• The School of Education where I study my undergraduate degree in pre-primary teacher education aims to create reflective teachers.

Bearing in mind that my dissertation topic is storytelling (vast and vague, so far), I have been thinking about the questions that could be the starting point for it. For now, this is what I have come up with:

1. How does storytelling help language acquisition?
2. What other roles does storytelling play in children's development?
3. What are the main trends regarding the use of storytelling in English teaching/learning?
4. What ingredients must storytelling have in order to maximise opportunities for language acquisition in general, and foreign language acquisition in particular?

I am aware that while questions 1, 3 and 4 help narrowing down the topic, question number two broadens it. Therefore, it is an issue I should not develop in depth, but I think it is useful to set the role of storytelling in education, and then narrow the topic down to storytelling related to language acquisition.

I am also aware that there should be a number 0 question: what is storytelling?, which is tricky itself, because storytelling is a common word whose meaning we take for granted, and those are usually the words most difficult to define. That was the first question my school placement tutor at university threw when we met to discuss how to link this last school placement with the dissertation, and I realised I had no answer for it.

Obviously, I have not narrowed down the topic enough yet, but I hope that once I start reading the articles I have downloaded so far, I will see things more clear.

Writing the questions has arisen a terminology problem: foreign language learning?, second language acquisition?, foreign language teaching? Which should I use in my dissertation? I guess it is time to ask my teachers guidance on whether they are equivalent terms or they are related to specific points of view.

The website our teachers created around the dissertation took me to action research regarding the options we have on the methodology for our research. Now, this is a very interesting topic, which I came across in my first year of the degree. In the unit on the theory and history of education we had a really good teacher who got us involved in cooperative learning, so each of us had to learn on a particular author and teach the rest of our classmates on it. I had never heard about any of the authors then, and when it was my turn to choose, I took John Elliott by chance. It was one of those enlightening coincidences, as I found the action research he advocated very inspiring. It is on number 37 of my long list of concepts and authors which make up my personal map on education (it might be a good idea to try to complete it and give it a more appealing form by the end of this academic year, by the way). Coming back to the GRAL guide, in my opinion this is what our School of Education means when they say they want to create reflective teachers. So, there I have another ingredient for my dissertation, which I will have to bear in mind while I do the literature review on my dissertation topic.