Disrupting Academic Publishing: The Story of the BC TEAL Journal
Scott Roy Douglas
The BC TEAL Journal is an open access peer-reviewed publication promoting scholarship related to English as an additional language (EAL) teaching and learning, with articles relevant to a wide range of contexts in British Columbia. Since its inception in 2016, the journal has been disrupting academic publishing and transforming the way English language teaching organizations support their members. Key to this disruption is the variety of topics that find their way into the pages of the journal. An overview of the past nine issues of the journal is provided, with highlights including canine-assisted therapy (Binfet et al., 2016), portfolio-based language assessment (Drew & Mudzingwa, 2018), workplace writing (Hu & Gonzales, 2020), task-based language lessons (Huang, 2022), EAP presentations (Martin, 2023), and care ethics (Baslee, 2024). The free and open dissemination of papers such as these are transforming the building of knowledge, theory, and practice in the field of EAL teaching and learning. The field is further being transformed by opportunities to contribute to the journal as readers, authors, and peer reviewers. Visitors to this poster will become more familiar with the journal and learn how it can support their own continuing professional development. The supports in place for the publication process are described and major steps such as manuscript preparation, peer review, copy editing, proof reading, and layout are outlined in detail. The goal of this poster presentation is to inspire BC TEAL members to continue to engage with local scholarship, volunteer as peer reviewers, and begin to plan their next article for submission.
Anti-Racist Pronunciation Pedagogy for CELBAN: First Nations English Dialects
Meghan Jones; Anna Armanca
The goal of this session is to suggest a new chapter in the Centre for Canadian Language Benchmark Assessment for Nurses (CELBAN) listening workbook. CELBAN is designed to assess the English proficiency of Internationally Educated Nurses (IEN). The current CELBAN workbooks have no mention of Indigenous, Aboriginal, or First Nations peoples of Canada. People entering Canada with hopes of working in the medical field need to be aware of First Nations English Dialects (FNED) (Ball, J., Bernhardt, B., & Deby, J., 2006; Ball, J., & Bernhardt, B.M., 2008; Bird, K. R., E., 2011; Fadden, L., & LaFrance, J., 2008) in addition to the Canadian history of colonialism and how this affects Indigenous people in healthcare today. Drawing on theories regarding Anti-Racist Pronunciation pedagogy and the responsibility of the listener (Ramjattan, 2023), this poster session argues that IENs must learn about FNED in order to meet the CELBAN requirements of identifying motivations, purposes, attitudes, and intention of speech. Focusing on sharing phonological resources and using each other’s pronunciation practices, encouraging a desire to understand one another despite barriers, and the creation of strategies for communication breakdown (Ramjattan, 2023, p. 321), the presenters suggest that this transformative approach could play a useful role at the intersection of the two broad communities in question. The presenters suggest an addition to the CELBAN Listening Handbook and Assessment, including audios of different dialects of English in Canada, with a primary focus on FNED, to facilitate an awareness of different pronunciations. By addressing the gap in CELBAN, the presenters are able to make suggestions to promote culturally safe care for the communities within Canada that require it the most. More implicitly, the presenters’ aim is also to help IENs with gaining confidence in their own pronunciations. The poster suggestions are thereby transferable to practitioners’ contexts, since the presenters argue that listening skills should be taught with an emphasis on understanding different accents in Canada with a grounding in APP and theories of decolonization in the EAL classroom.
Arguments: Their Shape, Flow and Use in the SLA Classroom
Michael Herke
In its most basic form, an argument is a claim and a reason to accept the claim. Argumentation is the process of clarifying the question at issue, gathering relevant evidence, and formulating the aforementioned reasons and the claim. Although it is a truism to state that arguments are everywhere and that everyone argues, one forum where arguments have yet to find a permanent place is the SLA classroom in Japan, perhaps because argument is conceived as a confrontational, win or lose interaction. This poster shows cooperative argument activities and their underlying concepts that have been used successfully in SLA classrooms.
Another reason for the hesitation to use argumentation activities may be that arguing well is challenging for students. College and high school students have difficulty judging argument quality but do respond positively to various interventions, including engaging in argument with peers, media tutorials and scaffolding (Kuhn, D., Zillmer, N., Crowell, A., & Zavala, J., 2013; Larson, Britt & Kurby, 2009; Wilson, K., & Devereux, L. 2014).
This poster presentation summarizes just such interventions. Following from the concept-based language instruction claim that learners need to internalize the systematic, scientific principles that underpin linguistic phenomena of interest via working with their materializations, salient features of arguments are shown as flow charts, diagrams, pictures and maps, to form SCOBAs, or schema for the orienting basis of action (Gal’perin, 1989; Hadidi, 2021; Lantolf and Thorne, 2006).
These features include common lines of argument (e.g. cause to effect, effect to cause, sign, generalization), their elements (i.e. evidence, claim, warrant, qualifier, etc.), how the elements interact and, most importantly, a variety of arguments relevant to college-aged learners. What is the best book or movie for someone who wants to understand Japanese culture? What is marriage? Is it marriage good or bad? Should people get married? Should I get married?
Participants can see and learn how arguments are structured, how they function, and how they enrich SLA classrooms of almost any level, background and topic.
