if i had a hammer...

not going well:

- didn't give good directions when I sent the stuff to everyone
- feeling like i'm alone on this stupid thing, i have to figure this out all by myself so of course i make mistakes!
- only got 3 back so far and the results don't look too good
- have looked into the Q test thing and it's pretty complex
- what am i thinking BEFORE spring break??? i'm crazy!
- i'm leaving on thursday 4AM and coming back sunday night... when is the work going to get done?
- tired and discouraged
- am completely unable to start writing my law paper (5 pages) due wednesday!
- am going to take a nap right now or something bad's going to happen.

some good stuff

i'm very proud to say that i have 48 statements that belong to 6 different categories (i've collapsed a few), that i've mixed them up, and sent them to:
21. Brita
1. Scott
2. Chris--ok
3. Jennifer
4. Tony
5. Tom--ok
6. Kanok--ok
7. Tarez
8. Shuoshao
9. Yuanyuan--ok
10. Nancy--ok
11. Dilia
12. Sue
13. Martha
14. Robert
15. Beth
16. Deb
17. Karen--ok
18. Gigi
19. Xiaoye--ok
20. Yufeng
22. Tunde--ok
23. Namrata--ok
24. Anais

i'm expecting to get about 10 back. i hope i'll get them back really quickly because i want to be done with this questionnaire and send the whole darn thing to the IRB before spring break!

i've found a translation agency that could do all the languages i need for about $200 a piece... i really want to work with professionals and with a central person who's in charge of the whole thing and not 10 different people who have different skills and who are not professionals! especially with the non-orthographic languages which i can't verify myself.

the next big thing is to find the schools. still don't know what margie could do or IF she could do anything at all to help... but i'm really unsure about writing to all those people i don't know and asking them to participate. it's a huge thing, it's complicated to explain, it'll require tons of work from everyone if they accept, it's time consuming, and well, i just don't want to make a mistake and ruin my chances of having tons of participants. i'll have to check with margie before i send the emails (btw, it's weird that i can use emails and don't have to actually write a snail letter... times change!).

while i ask for participation from all those schools, i also need to check with their IRB... that could be a real pain!

i've decided to include native speakers for sure now. it will at least double my pool of participants!!

languages

french
german
thai
spanish
portuguese
korean
japanese
chinese
russian
arabic
malay?
indonesian?
italian?

http://www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/MyAgency.asp?Mode=example
http://www.oceanbreezewebs.com/BCT/
http://www.languagetrainingcenter.com/translation.asp

hard

having a hard time creating statements that fit all my categories. i have a few, but i want to have 4 or 5 statements per construct so that i can work with them, transform, eliminate, combine, ... i'm also trying to have both positive and negative statements... and i need to find people who'll rate those statements. wish i could ask A. and P. at unh, and L. in california, and G. in hong kong... yeah... would take too much time. although i'll see L. in a week... need to think about it.

talking about california, it's a complete nightmare, i don't know what to do for my presentation, plus i have this huge law paper to write before i go, plus tons of long student papers to grade...

i'm just stressing out a lot right now! feeling really overwhelmed and not qualified to do what i have to do.

serious stuff

about student questionnaires:

- what are my constructs?
- which questions relate to which construct? and how many questions per construct?
- need to test the questions
- verify the order of the questions, the wording, if they can tell which statement goes with which construct
- how many positive/negative questions?
- Q-sort: random set of questions, 5 constructs (or whatever), match them
- discrimination rating: respond to statements on likert scales as if you were an ESL student with a positive attitude, eliminate those who are unclear
- ask participants to suggest modifications
- add follow-up interviews w/sts too!
- find 5-10 people to take the Q-sort+discrimination rating

- include a clear definition of NS and NNS on the questionnaires!

- ask NNS AND NS to participate?? what about specific questions at the end?'
- if so, need about the same # of NS and NNS!

- intensity sampling to select who's going to participate? don't think so, 1) the director will approve or not, 2) the teachers will accept or not to participate.


hypotheses: there will be significant differences in responses according to:
1. country of origin/first language of the students
2. country of origin of the teachers
3. age of the students
4. gender of the students
5. intents to return to country of origin
6. previous exposure to other cultures (especially that of the teacher) (=how many NNS teachers before, if visited country of teacher, if speaking language of teacher, etc.)
7. level of proficiency in english of the students
8. reasons for learning english
9. expected grade in the class
10. the class taught

constructs:
1. teacher is a good role model
2. teacher looks/sounds typically american
3. teacher is a good teacher overall
4. student is not worried about NNS
5. teacher knows about american culture
6. student is willing to learn about other cultures
7. teacher is a good cultural/emotional(?) resource
8. teacher understands language learning difficulties
9. class will be (was) a good experience

blah

have decided that i'm done with the teacher and admin questionnaires, so i'm now working on the student ones. don't want to write a letter to all the iep administrators asking them to let me use them, their teachers, and their students for my study. yuck.

cats driving me crazy, life too, i'm smoking again like a chimney and starting to feel really anxious about the catesol presentation in a couple of weeks and the tesol stuff too. and wondering how on earth i'll manage to survive 4 days in long beach and 6 in san antonio without a SINGLE CENT on my bank account. not good. hopefully i'll get that one credit card i asked for that should allow me to survive until... the cows come home... or money, for that matter...

blah

help needed

there are plenty of people out there who know how to get to work and get things done! could someone PLEASE tell me how to do it? because i'm so lazy i think i'll spend the rest of my life trying to get this damn phd... i just can't make myself work!!!!!! i used to find other stuff to do, like the dishes, or cleaning the house, or grading papers... but now i tell myself NO, you CAN'T do other things... so now not only do i still not work, but i also live in a dirty house and never grade my students' papers... that's not good...

8/14

A. told me that i'd be lucky if 50% of my participants returned their questionnaire. so... tomorrow i'll finish the admin and the teacher questionnaires and submit them to margie for a final look at things and then i'll submit them to the IRB. am not sure yet now i'll do it with the students...

everyone's on vacation in france and switzerland... haha... no vacation for me until the middle of march and even then...

i'm so broke i don't know how i'll manage at the 2 conferences i'm going to.

blah!

not good

i created a website for the iawe 2005 conference... and at the last minute, also sent a proposal written in 10 minutes for a presentation on a topic i have NO CLUE about and i just made it up praying that i wouldn't get it... and now it looks like it's the main topic of the conference and that i'll be one of the featured speaker or something... damned!

am NOT ready for the catesol presentation. i read the abstract i sent to get an idea what i needed to prepare... hahah... no clue what to do and how to do it, and the conference is in 2 weeks...

thank goodness i have nothing to present at tesol in a month... but i got the info from the people who are candidates for the vice-president position and it's ugly. there're 4 people, including me, who did NOT apply but was nominated, and the other people present themselves like highly professional and pretentious people (i'm the first one who said this, i published that, i've been doing this for 35 years...) and crazy goals for the caucus (i'm going to save the world, i'm going to make all the nonnative speakers in the world famous and happy...), and i'm feeling really DUMB with my retarded biographical statement (i'm a phd student and have published nothing) and my retarded goals (i'm going to help the other leaders of the caucus and increase membership...)... so basically, there are 4 candidates, 2 of them who are well known (one because she IS quoted in every single paper related to nonnative speakers and me because i'm the webmanager of the thing), and only 1 who's been super active in the caucus: ME! who would you vote for? someone you've never heard of, someone you've quoted 500 times in your paper but never actually seen or heard, or someone you've heard and seen everywhere and all the time? dammit!!!!

teaching

it's been a while since i've felt so good about my students and my teaching. i am able to do the things i want to do, my students do what i ask them to do (most of the time), there's no major problem so far, and i don't know why, but i feel more confident than i have these two last semesters. i was a great teacher fall 2003 and winter 2004, but last summer and fall were serious desasters! it's nice to be a good teacher again! it's nice to look at my students and think that i love them and that i'm proud of them and that i want to do my best for them.

got one questionnaire back with really good feedback! thanks yuanyuan!

http://www.nwccu.org/

unsure

went to talk to A. for a long time! talked about everything, politics, the law, hiring new teachers, our students, the midwest, etc. and could have talked for the rest of the day. she allowed me to use her teachers/students if they agreed to participate, and also gave me a couple of ideas about some of the questions i ask and how it didn't work. i guess any help is better than no help.

got one teacher survey back with no comments at all... the person said some questions were confusing but didn't say which ones or why. haven't heard back from margie... nor anyone else.

haven't done anything lately. no law reading, no paper grading, no dissertation reading, no survey writing... wonder how i'm going to survive. got a hotel for san antonio for tesol though, and i also got an ingeneering teacher to come and talk to my students about the importance of writing in ALL jobs, not just in english. that'll be good. oh, and this morning i went to an EndNote traning session and that was really cool. I'll go to a more advanced one for three hours next week, because it'll really help my writing/researching/reference gathering process!

http://www.endnote.com

whatever

meeting with A. today. not sure why.
no surveys back.

sent the list of possible participating schools to margie. will see if she writes an intro letter. that'd be very nice.
i have 18 schools. with her recommendation and considering that some that agree to participate won't have the right kind of teachers/schedule/whatever, i should be able to get about 5 good participants. i'd be happy with 5. i don't know if i could handle more than that anyway.

pretty angry at life right now. not exactly sure why.

4/9

sent the second draft of my teacher questionnaires to the second group of participants. plus a reminder to the first group.
so far not so good... made some good modifications based on the first few questionnaires i got back, though, but it's not good enough yet.

if i get even only ONE more admin. questionnaire i'll go ahead and start reviewing it for the final draft so then i only have to start working on the student questionnaires. i need to read fox' dissertation for that and it's a bit overwhelming... if i could have all the questionnaires DONE and sent to the irb before spring break that'd be really nice!

i've also showed to margie how i could put the teacher and admin. questionnaires ONLINE! yeah, i think it'll make my life so much easier!! the student questionnaires, though, won't work online, since they're in like 10 languages... one good thing is that not all the ieps i've found start their semester at the same time in august/september and end their semester at the same time in december.

i also need to write to those guys, and that's a bit scary...

insisting

i don't know why.


i don't see the point.

it's not going anywhere.


same thing since 1973!

gggrrrrr

f'ing system! i sent out my surveys by email and when people sent them back it was caught by the anti-spam system of the university, and since they are pretty much automatically deleted, i didn't realize that people HAD sent the surveys back! i'm going to have to send it all again. ...

A. is not cooperating well... i asked her if i could use her teachers and her students and if she could have a look at my surveys because she IS after all the expert in that kind of stuff in the department... but it doesn't look like it's going to go well!

got my evaluations back from last semester. i can honestly say that NEVER in my life have i had such horrible evaluations. not that i expected anything good, but that was plain BAD! even waaaaayyyyy worse than my second semester here when i had all these problems with difficult students, drugs, plagiarism, the irak war, etc. so on the evaluations you get graded on a likert scale from 1 to 5, and i usually get between 4 and 5 for each item... but last semester, out of 28 items, i only got THREE at 3.0 or above (the maximum being 3.9 (my teacher explains policies for attendance and late assignments)! 23 items got between 2.0 and 2.9 and two items were below 2.0! and i only got two comments, one saying "she was by far the worst english teacher i've ever had!" and the other one complaining about favoritism. i guess i didn't like those students much and they didn't like me much either!! funny to think that last year i got a teaching award because my evaluations for fall and spring were incredibly good (lowest i got was 4.7 on only 2 items both semesters)!... huhuh...

huhuh

got a survey back from B.
great feeback!
must thank scott for telling me to add B. to my committee!
wish the other folks sent me the stuff back too...

feel like taking a break from the other blog... i feel a little like i did when i was trying to explain why bush was going to win the elections and no one would believe me! frustrated and mad. i'm too emotional.

award

so i talked with margie about the iawe website that we're trying to build and she mentionned that award that i got a couple of weeks ago... the one that i didn't know what it was about... and she said she was surprised i wasn't more enthusiastic about it! i said i had no clue what it was, where it came from, what it meant, who gave it to me, and why! PLUS the email i got telling me about it was also sent to her and i didn't understand why, and then she sent me an email congratulating me, and i thought she thought i had forwarded her the message to show off or something... anyway. and i told her about my miserable semester last semester and she said ALL teachers had bad semesters! i said my students certainly hadn't come to the department to say what a wonderful teacher i was! so she told me that i was a school award, not even a department award, that of the whole english department, only 4 people could have it and that they (english dept?) had selected like 10 possible recipients among the about 200 people in the english dept. and then asked the individual teachers to choose only 4 among those 10 possible people, and margie chose me. huh, nice :) i said "well that makes it a lot better, thank you :)"

research: already got one response back with some useful feedback. am going to call the schools right now and to find more infor about other schools because i want to use byu's elc and urbana-champaign too.

the skin around my nails is almost entirely gone, i don't know what's wrong with me, why i'm so nervous all the time... it's so painful that i can't even get a manicure... yeah, who cares?!

sent

first teacher questionnaire sent to my pilot participants... i'll wait until i get them back to re-write them and send them again but to a different group of pilot participants... i am also done with the administrators questionnaires. it's tough, i really have to decide what i WANT to know now and also what i'll not use for this study but could possibly use for further studies and articles and conference presentations and stuff... yuck. at the same time i can't write a 200 question questionnaire so i really have to balance things intelligently.

must work on my student questionnaires, those are the most serious and difficult ones. margie said i should pilot them on our 106i students. i'll ask T. for the permission... and also maybe A. to see if i can use her OEPP students, as second group, that 'd be nice.

also need to write to mike brzezinski about professional translators.

also need to call (contact) all the schools below to ask about demographics of students + names of directors so that margie can contact them first :)

margie also found some interesting stuff about the IRB and i hope all will go well. once i have all my questionnaires written and i'm done with the pilot stuff, i can apply for this irb thing and normally it shouldn't be too difficult to get approved.

ESL teachers for pilot:

Brita: bbanitz@purdue.edu--ok
Kanok: glass@purdue.edu--ok
Shuozhao: hous@purdue.edu--ok
Dilia: khasanov@purdue.edu--ok
Yufeng: zhyufeng@purdue.edu
Xiaoye: youx@purdue.edu--ok
T.
B.--ok
S.

Karen: kremedio@purdue.edu--ok
Jeanne: ylee@purdue.edu
Yuanyuan: yuanyhu@purdue.edu--ok
Martha: michieka@purdue.edu
Slobodanka: dimova@purdue.edu

CEA

ELI Pittsburgh: http://www.eli.pitt.edu/FACULTY/index.html,  Alan Juffs Director, elipitt@pitt.edu, (412) 624-5901. juffs at pitt.edu

Univ. of Iowa IEP: http://www.uiowa.edu/~iiepesl/, (319) 335-5630, SL Program Coordinator: Maureen Burke maureen-burke at uiowa.edu

CALState Univ. Long Beach: (562) 985-8424, aliuces@csulb.edu, http://www.uces.csulb.edu/ali/. Nina Ito. nito at uces.csulb.edu

Univ. Miami: iep@miami.edu, 305-284-2752, http://www.miami.edu/iep Director: Michelle Alvarez. malvarez at miami.edu

ELI George Madison Univ. VA: eli@gmu.edu, (703) 993-3660, http://eli.gmu.edu/ Director Kathy Trump. ktrump at gmu.edu

CESL Univ. of Arizona: http://www.cesl.arizona.edu/faculty.html, Director, Suzanne Panferov, panferov at email.arizona.edu

ELI Texas A&M: http://eli.tamu.edu/directory/directory.aspx?type=1, Dr. Kathleen Clark, Director, kclark at tamu.edu

Univ. of Washington, Campus IEP: 14 weeks? http://depts.washington.edu/uwelp/about/profiles.shtml, Patty Heiser, pheiser at u.washington.edu, (206) 543-6242

Univ. of Kansas,AEC: Chuck Seibel Director, http://www.aec.ku.edu/allabout/teachers.html, 785-864-4606, cseibel at ku.edu

ELI Univ. @ Buffalo, NY: Kathy L. Curtis, Associate Director, http://wings.buffalo.edu/eli, (716) 645 2077) curtiskl at acsu.buffalo.edu

UCAELI Univ. of Conn.: hhttp://www.ucaeli.uconn.edu/english/staff_faculty/, Kristi Newgarden, Director, kristi.newgarden at uconn.edu

Duquesne Univ.: Director, Dr. Jona E. Hammer, 412.396.5734, hammer at dug.edu, http://www.esl.duq.edu/index.html

Univ. of South Florida: http://www.cas.usf.edu/eli/staff.htm, elimain@cas.usf.edu, Barbara Smith-Palinkas, Assistant Director smith-pa at chuma1.cas.usf.edu

ELC Brigham Young Univ.: http://humanities.byu.edu/elc/ELCBrochure.html, Glenn Probst, Neil Anderson Glen_Probst at byu.edu

IEI Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Susan Gonzo Director s-gonzo at uiuc.edu http://www.iei.uiuc.edu/student_teacher_contact.html

CISCIS Western Michigan Univ.: http://www.wmich.edu/celcis/S-staff.html, Laura Latulippe Director, laura.latulippe at wmich.edu

ELC Michigan State: http://elc.msu.edu/people.html Susan Gass Director, gass at msu.edu

WESL Western Illinois Univ.: Lynne Wayne Assistant Director, LS-Wayne at wiu.edu http://www.wiu.edu/users/miintl/wesl/staff/index.html

http://www.uciep.org/index.php
http://www.aaiep.org/

dammit

i don't know what happened but i lost an entire sbudirectory from my server... the one with all my surveys, my exams, my quizzes, stuff written and used for the last two years! yeah... kinda frustrating! (realized it thanks to kiara, thank you kiara! i wish you'd given me better news ;)) i can't figure out why. it happened when i created another subdirectory. wonder if it's because i had the same password and login name... but i had done it before and didn't have any problem. dammit.

talking about websites, i need to do some training today to learn how to access the tesol server to put our caucus' website there... but half of the members of the caucus are very unhappy about that idea... someone even said we should have both the private website and the one on tesol! i said i don't think so dude, i'm not managing TWO full websites for you! ... i shouldn't care much anyway because i've been the web manager for this caucus for long enough, it's time for me to find someone who'll replace me soon. plus i'm applying for the vice-chair position... not that i'll get it but why not... well actually i really don't WANT it but it'll be good for my ego if i get it. yeah, i'm dumb, nothing new there!

dark clouds bright sun

ok so could someone tell me how this works?! i have this major mess in my head, this overwhelming panic all over me, this feeling that i'm doing thirty thousand things at the same time and not doing anything at the same time, the feeling that i'm all doing it wrong and not going anywhere... and then i just go talk to margie and it all becomes clear and simple and easy. weird.

so i first thought i could do my big study in the fall, then i gave up and decided to do it in the winter... but now it looks like i could do it in the fall after all...

i HAVE a brain, i CAN do something with it!!

dammit! stop playing with the cats and move your fat ass!!!

http://www.eli.pitt.edu/index.html

panic

sometimes, like this afternoon, when i'm just reading and reading and looking for more stuff to read, i panic. i feel paralyzed, incapable to think, as if i was drowning in cold water like a boulder. too much. too many things to think of, to remember, to do, to read, to start, to finish, to write, to survive.

funny that it's on those days that i usually do the most...

i need to talk to margie, though. i don't know where i'm going and what i'm supposed to do right now. i need short-term goals and deadlines!