MONSTER

ok, i have exactly 36 statements about teachers in general and 34 statements about one teacher in particular! that's 70 statements the students will have to agree or disagree with. now, the question is, do i dare ask 40 students of a pilot study to respond to SEVENTY statements??? i mean if i had to do this i'd go crazy loca nuts! maybe i could divide this into 2 groups of students, but i'd have to have 2 groups of 40. for a pilot, that's a lot!

i'm frustrated because it's the weekend PLUS the end of the semester, so everyone's overwhelmed with work, i can't talk to anyone until monday, i'm stuck at home, and things are not moving along! oh well, i'll work on this book review of mine (i'm reading the book right now, kinda long...) and the ET article. i went to the writing lab today and got some good feedback from gigi about one idea i should mention in the paper and try to make it fit in the 1800 word limit... oh, and i need to grate my students' final papers too. so there, that'll be my fun weekend :)

thanks a LOT to the person who got me the dissertation book :) :) :) i don't know who it is yet, but i'm very excited to get it and hopefully i'll see who sent it!!! that was very kind!!!

it's raining, i'm happy!! oh, and i now have 30 potential participating schools! took me HOURS to find them, goodness, i had no idea the ESL programs in this country were so different from one another!

OMG!

OH MY GOD! i talked with this one psychology professor yesterday for one hour, and one hour today with another teacher... and I learned more in those TWO HOURS than in the last TWO MONTHS!! WHY DID I WAIT???? note to self: if i don't find what i need right away, i shouldn't try to play smart and to figure it out by myself, this is a WASTE OF TIME! yesterday, this one teacher showed me how to work with constructs, how to calculate the reliability of the thing, how to do a meaningful pilot study, and today, the guy read my questionnaire and talked about each question, one by one, told me what worked and what didn't, told me about some problems, gave me some good suggestions, talked about statistics, explained the stuff i didn't understand (why i should want a normal distribution, for example, and why i could use ANOVAs instead of Chi square analyses even though i've learned that i shouldn't, and other stuff i could use, and how to do the factor analysis for my pilot), and i just feel like that's it, i know how to do the damn thing! those two teachers have been soooooo kind and helpful and patient, and they both said i could go and talk to them again this summer... wow, what a relief!!!!!

so:
#1.1: send the constructs + questions to aya, george, lia, and paul so they can give me new questions
#1.2: finish the student questionnaire (one for pilot, one for real)
#1.3: rewrite the teacher+ administrator questionnaires
#1.4: go talk to those two psyc teachers before doing the pilot
#2: find more IEPs, i saw that the return rate is about 20% so if i have only 20 potential participating schools, that's not going to work!
#3.1: find a school where i can do the pilot; i think it could be anywhere, since i won't do the pre+post
#3.2: DO the pilot ASAP!
#3.3: calculate the reliability of the whole thing
#3.4: rewrite the questionnaire based on results + rework teacher/ administrator questionnaires
#4: send letters to all IEPs
#5: find out about most spoken languages

When i'm done with that, the whole thing will be almost done! hah!!!

ok, here i go... #1.1 .... yes yes...

chitty chitty bang bang

another psych teacher wrote me back, i'm meeting with him today. meeting with the other one tomorrow.

lia, paul, aya, and george wrote me back with some good comments on my constructs.

it's raining.

i spent $150 on cat food/stuff for the summer, yesterday.

one more day of teaching and 16 papers to grade and one law paper to write and i'm done. wow, last paper for a class i'm writing, LAST ONE EVER!

this spring, i must:
- finish the ET article
- write the TQ review
- finish my questionnaires (that seems like a recurrent theme here)
- translate my questionnaires
- find a place to do another pilot
- prepare my conference presentations for IAWE and AILA
- send letters to all the ieps and get them to participate
- i think that's it for spring. i don't want to think about summer yet!

yeahhhhh i love the rain :)

alone in the desert

wouah, this is incredible, i feel like i'm doing my best and trying to keep my head out of the water and reach a shore, any kind of land, an island, a ship, anything so i don't drown... but it's getting harder and harder. i asked for an emergency meeting with T., maybe he can help me, and i will also meet with someone from the psychology department, that can be a good thing. i wrote to the secretary of the psych dept and asked her for a name, anyone who would be an expert in attitude surveys, and she sent the email to the whole dept and one person responded. i know it's a bad time in the semester to do that, everyone's overwhelmed with work and stuff, but i need help, desperatly! every time i think i've done something good, it turns out that it's not good enough or not what i needed to do.

last night i also sent a list of constructs to some experts in nonnative issues, george, paul, lia, aya, elza, tony, rosie, and ahmar, to ask for some fresh perspectives and comments, and paul, george, and aya responded so far, and i did get some interesting feedback, so that feels like a little island in the middle of the ocean, a place to rest for a minute. but it also made me realize that some things are still unclear, and i just want to screem and burn the whole thing and jump out the window. fortunately it's too cold and i can't even make myself get out of bed because i'd freeze right away!

the in-a-year graduation seems less and less likely...

could someone please offer me the Dissertation Journey book that's in my wishlist? That'd be soooo kind of you!

ps. got a positive response from the tq review editor about the book review i wanted to write. yeah! will work on that asap!

i can't believe it

it's snowing!!! it's been freezing cold last night and today... and snowing all afternoon. WTF???
it was 87F 3 days ago...

other thoughts

Wanda asked me why english students of nonnative english-speaking teachers would complain about the fact that they are nonnative speakers of english, while most languages classes, for example here at purdue, are taught by nonnative speakers of those language (and thus native speakers of english, in this case, although i know someone who speaks serbian natively and who teaches spanish!). well the question is a good one, except that we have need to remember two things:

1. english has a special status in the world today. way more people want to learn english than say, french. english is the language of the future... blah blah blah. so in the end, they want to learn english better and are more serious about it than if they were learning french. in general.

2. it's ESL and not EFL. imagine you live in the US and want to learn japanese. you'll probably have native english-speaking japanese teachers at first, maybe a few japanese native speakers if you're lucky, and then if you're super serious about learning japanese you'll go to japan. to do so, you'll spend a LOT of money and you'll expect to have the REAL japanese experience, with real japanese speakers and all. if, once in japan, one of your teachers is a native speaker of spanish, you'll be pretty upset.

now, remind me why i want to prove that nonnative english-speaking teachers can be good esl teachers???!!! damn, i'd be pretty upset too if i were those students! i'm insane to want to prove that they shouldn't be upset! insane!

a fish called wanda

nah i'm kidding. i met with wanda fox and she's wonderful! we talked for an hour about my research and hers, and i loved that she had an "education" perspective and not a linguistic one. she gave me a lot of good ideas, tips, encouragements, and different ways to look at things. i should have talked to her way sooner!! i'll try to see her again a few times this summer.

so basically, i'm starting almost all over again, by rewriting constructs (from students' perspectives this time, not from teachers') and reworking my questions. i REALLY had it easy for my master's, it was a joke, i can't believe people let me do it the way i did! i guess that's the difference between a master's and a phd. the sad thing is that no one is asking me to do it so "carefully" in the english department, but it's because of the TQ article, it scared me, and made me realize that i needed to verify what i was doing way more carefully, and that i needed NUMBERS, statistics, alphas and p-values, correlation coefficients, reliability scores, validity contructs, and blah blah blah, all that junk for 30 questions!

one interesting thing that wanda said was that she created her questionnaire and did a small pilot but then her results allowed other people to work from there and do replication studies with her instrument with all the changes she'd suggested in her discussion. so basically, since i can't express myself tonight, her study was a "pilot" for better studies that were later done by other people. and since no one has ever done what i want to do, i guess i need to remember that i CANNOT have all the reliability and validity stuff perfect, since to have those, you need to have large-scale results, already! so my study will be a pilot, and then i'll tell everything that didn't work and what should be changed to make my instruments better to replicate my study elsewhere. that makes me feel better, and that i shouldn't feel bad if things are not "perfect" with a vague pilot study with 40 participants... except that it increases the pressure, also, because my instrument must be somehow decent if i want other people to use it again.

on a more abnoxious note, the irb is a pain! i had to give up the interviews for them, send them copies of everything i was going to send, even letters of intro to the iep directors, and now they're telling me i won't be allowed to ask for 20 minutes of class time for the students to fill out the questionnaires but instead i have to "ask the teacher to finish early" and if they agree to do so, then i can go in... don't see the difference... but anyway. it seems to be their last battle with me, and i've won with the translations, so let's not complain too much.

i think i slept 4 hours last night! the law presentation went well though, i think...

huhuh

ok i don't want to sound too prideful, but i have to say this: [post edited to avoid problems] i should not be afraid to listen to my instinct!

i worked on the ET article all afternoon, and on my @!^%$ questionnaire too. things going ok. i feel like this article won't be too hard to write (no argument, no serious lit review) but i just need to make it fun and interesting... and that might be harder. but it's a fun article to work on because it's not about the usual stuff!!!! plus once it's sent, they respond within 6 weeks! no word from the review editor, though. i'll still work on it once the semester's over and i'm done with grading five hundred million papers and writing my final law paper.

grrr

goodness i hate to make big fat mistakes that i could have avoided had i been more careful and that look REALLY bad and make me look stupid and dumb and retarded... which seems to be what i am!

articles

i've sent 2 proposals for one book review and one article, and got a positive answer for the article... now i just need to write it. shouldn't be tooooo hard, it's not TQ!

have created a blog for the nnest caucus... people are getting in slowly, it's nice. hopefully it'll work well.

i'm working on my questionnaire, STILL... and making a lot of changes based on the interviews i had. the sad thing, though, is that once i'm done with the student questionnaire i'll have to redo the teacher and administrator questionnaires, since they should be approximately the same... brought the whole thing to the irb again and asked them to please work on it quickly because i STILL haven't been able to contact the school administrators and want to do it before the end of the semester! and then start on the translations.

i think i shouldn't worry about the math yet, and should have a short pilot at byu this summer and then redo the math, it'd make more sense to do it with students who are actually typical participants and not university students. i've been thinking about the poor results i got so far, though, and am wondering if it's not because i've put all the answers together instead of dividing them between native and nonnative teachers. their answers are quite different, i've noticed, so it'd make sense that they wouldn't work well together! we'll see...

book reviews

i wonder if i could write a book review of the new book edited by lia. it's big and i'm not so good... well actually i've never done a book review so i guess i would suck at it. it'd be nice, though, to try, at least. one problem is that i wouldn't know where i could send it so i wouldn't know what's required for the publication in question. but if it's half good, i could submit it to the esl award thingy next year.

i've sent a short summary of a small study i did with my esl students a year ago to the ET editor to ask her if she thinks it'd make a good article. this journal is not very "academic" but it's still a peer-reviewed journal and a tesol publication so it's always a good thing. i need to work on stuff like that this summer!

(ok i just check chris tardy's cv and website at depaul, and it's highly depressing. she has a list of publications and presentations longer than anything anyone could imagine. there's no hope for me).

done with the law presentation handout and outline. have read two more chapters of the AWGS book, and this was good. i wish i'd had this book three years ago. dammit, that reminds me that i'll be a FOURTH year PhD student in the fall, that's scary!

some days i think i can make it in four years. some days i think it's crazy.
since spring break, i've worked a lot and very efficiently. but i don't know if it'll last and i don't know if it'd be enough to finish things up by august 2006.

i'll start the 002 website right now, that's what i'll do, because i'm sick of the patriot act and academic writing!

efficiency is my first name

i finished the response letter for the irb, finished the intro letter for the iep directors as well as the description of the study i'll attach to their email, filled out the form for consent exemption request, sent the whole thing to margie, worked on the stuff about the patriot act for my law presentation on thursday, made an appointment with WF for thursday, read five chapters of academic writing for graduate students, made an appointment with the vet for monday to remove sosso's stitches, sent a mean message to someone who bothers me a lot with his arrogance, played with the cats, ate well, and found three more ieps i could use for my research. overall i can say i haven't wasted my saturday!

stats

i went to the stats dept, finally! talked with melissa for 2 hours and got all the info i needed to finish AND SEND the tq article!!! also tried to work with the pilot study and verify the reliability of my quesitonnaire... but it doesn't work well, i don't know what i'm doing wrong. tried crombach alpha and other stuff... and no, it won't work, it'll give me an alpha of 0.80 with the first construct but then i get stuff like 0.34 or 0.55.... and my constructs don't even seem to fit the "computer's" constructs. that'd not good! the conclusion of all this is the following: i have no idea what i'm doing!

i wonder if i could maybe have a real pilot at byu with a reworked questionnaire (but then how would i get the thing translated?? or should i use only high proficiency level students??).

i wrote to A. to ask her if she could recommend anyone from the psychology dept who'd be an expert in likert scales, but i doubt she'll answer. i'm going to call right now. i am discouraged, and the fact that my advisor doesn't know about all this doesn't help.

and i wrote an email to wanda fox. hopefully she'll help me!

pressure

the pressure is increasing!

i'll send the tq article tomorrow.

i also need to contact the psychology department to get help with my questionnaires.

nnest caucus chair

the first time i realized that was at the caucus social. i was eating dinner with everyone, and i was talking with three really cool women from denmark, turkey, and china. and it was fun! and as we were laughing and sharing ideas and telling about our lives, i was thinking that the previous chair could never have done that. i don't know if it was an age thing, or a gender thing, or whatever else... and i'm not saying that the previous chair(s) was not a wonderful guy who did not do tons of great work for the caucus! i hope i can have his energy and strength! what i'm saying is that i will have a very different relationship with the members of our caucus from the one he did. i will be able to make some members feel more "seen" or "valued" or "important" maybe... and the emails i've started receiving since i got back from san antonio say exactly that. one person said that before, she felt like the caucus was "exclusive" and she didn't feel very comfortable speaking up, volunteering, or participating. i will try to change that. i guess i'm just "appealing" to a different audience, and i hope i won't lose the other people, those who did feel comfortable with the way the caucus was until now.

i have worked at least 2 hours per day so far with this caucus thing, and i need to do more, because of the proposal deadlines. this is scaring me, and it's very hard because i wish i could ask for help, but at the same time, i don't want people to think i'm unable to do the job. for example yesterday, i publicly announced that someone had been given the position of listserv manager, and someone wrote me and said "XYZ asked for the position first, did you let him know that he wasn't getting it or didn't you see that he had applied?" this kind of comment really doesn't make me want to ask for help any more than i HAVE to!

same thing with the colloquium. i had an idea, and the past chair said no no no, do this instead, trust me, i know what i'm talking about, blah blah blah. and it's sooo hard for me to decide how much i rely on his experience, because he DOES know what he's talking about, he was chair for 2 years, or how much i can say that maybe my ideas are good too, even if they're not the same as his. i am still trying to find a way to compromise, but it's going to be tough, and i hope this kind of situation won't last too long and that some people will start trusting me and/or helping me as if i were a responsible adult and not a child.

veeery interesting!

i am looking at the responses given by students of native vs. nonnative english-speaking teachers! it's quite interesting! the biggest difference so far is in the responses to these statements:

i prefer NATIVE English-speaking teachers: students of native teachers say yes! students of nonnative teachers say not sure. (does it really mean that they sometimes like nonnative teachers or that they don't want to be mean?)

NONNATIVE teachers have difficulties understanding and responding to students' questions: students of native speakers say not sure! students of nonnative speakers say no!

my teacher's explanations and directions are clear in general: students of native teachers say yes, students of nonnative teachers say not sure.

if i could choose a new teacher today i would: students of native teachers strongly disagree, students of nonnative teachers disagree.

overall i like my english teacher this semester: 20/20 students of native teachers say yes, 17/20 students of nonnative teachers say yes. (doesn't that contradict the above results???)

weird.

good news: i called the stats dept. again and made an appointment with the for wednesday! note to self: don't ever wait for people to contact you, even if you've reminded them and called them and emailed them 200 times! i've also worked most of the day on the article and only need to add a few standard dev. and t-test results (which i'll get on wednesday!) and i'll be DONE! yeeeeehaaa!!!

good news

george sent me the article back! wow, tons of work to do but i'll do it!! and will try to send the whole thing to TQ BY THE END OF THIS WEEK!!!

i would love to buy a book called writing for graduate students or something like that, it'd help me a lot because i'm having such a hard time writing!!! so if anyone wants to send it to me, here's my wishlist address. you can send it anonymously or not, if you've been a faithful reader of this blog but never said hi and would like to encourage me :) there are a few books on that list, so if you feel rich, go ahead, don't hesiste, huhuh... i can't buy anything anymore since long beach and san antonio emptied my bank account and i won't have a job this summer!!

i also want to be a member of that. does anyone know how i could access it without paying hundreds of dollars??

cool

i just finished interviewing someone for my pilot, and this guy was very helpful because he too is using questionnaires for his research (in aeronotical engineering) and so knew of my challenges and problems. that was nice. other than that, i've talked to 2 people yesterday and 2 today, which means that i have had 7 interviews, which is good. i am thinking of doing a REAL big pilot next fall, instead of the real study, with one IEP (like BYU), with real ESL students and over time. because the more i talked with my interviewees, the more i realize they are really not like my real participants. i mean, i got tons and tons of helpful comments but it's be nice to see how real esl students in iep would respond to the questionnaires.

other than that, i need to see how different the answers were between students of native and students of nonnative teachers. good thing i got 20 of each!!!

i don't think that i'll graduate next summer. so the pilot in the fall would be nice and then the real thing in the winter... and then i'd have a year to write it all up. plus i have to teach 108 and 002 next fall, two new classes i've never taugh before... so... there! plus i want to teach 227 or 505 once before i graduate. whatever. that's all folks.

finally!

finally one small good news: i got one grant, the smallest one but it's better than nothing since i won't be working this summer. it's only for 2 months.... but it'll allow me to survive. i still need to work on the tirf proposal, that's the BIG one that i MUST get! cross your fingers. it's due may 31, so i'll work on it more after the end of the semester.

i went to xiaoye's dissertation defense today. overall it seemed easy, even though a few questions were tricky. but he did well and he did great! he said the only requirement of penn state, when they hired him, was the he'd write a book out of his dissertation and get it published, and then he'd get tenure. hah, i wouldn't like that! but he'll make it, he's good, i wish i had his drive and motivation!

so i'm still stuck with my article and my research... nothing from the stats dept, nothing from george, nothing from my advisor, this drives me crazy! so i keep reading about how to write great questionnaires (which only scares me even more) and guess i'll spend a weekend doing NOTHING! YEAH!!!!!

exhausted

so i had all this energy in the last 2-3 weeks, since spring break, really, and have done so much!! and now i'm stuck, because of 2 things: this girl in the statistics department who's not writing me back (and pretended she never recieved my first email) and my advisor who didn't like me to call the irb before i asked her. we're going to have to make up our minds: am i on my own here, or not?? because i thought i was, except for moral support...

it's frustrating!

i had a third interview today and it was good, and tomorrow i have 3 interviews after i go to xiaoye's dissertation defense. that one guy today was really cute!!

A.'s supposed to call me tonight, he's still in the US and i need help with the caucus stuff... i don't want to depend on people's help with that thing, and i know that some think i'll have to be "assisted" ... i don't want to be like the last emperor, a face, with the controlling powers behind me!

anyway, you could almost think i'm french, with all this complaining! hehe!!

time to kill

it took me, door to door, 19 hours yesterday to go from my hotel in san antonio to my apartment in lafayette! yep! totally unfun! i am so stressed out and overwhelmed with work that i haven't had time to eat a real meal since lunch on sunday, nor to take a shower for that matter, and it's not good!

so i got exactly FOURTY questionnaires back from international students (20 from teachers who are native speakers of english and 20 from nonnative teachers). i also got 10 student interviews! that's good. i called the statistics consultants and hope to meet with them next week to discuss what to do with the results of the pilots and how to work on the questionnaire.

i heard back from the irb: minor changes my behind!!!! they want, among others, that i give them the TRANSLATED versions of the questionnaires but i don't think so! i'll work on the rest... but i've made one decision: NO INTERVIEWS with the iep students/teachers/administrators. i just called the irb because i was confused about some of their stuff, and they said it'd be insanely complicated to do the interviews too.

and trust me, don't become chair of anything. it looks nice on your resume but it's a lot of work!!!

iep

so i am dead... but i found THREE iep directors who already agreed to participate in my study!! usu, ut austin, and byu! that's GOOD!

didn't get the grant, i'm really pissed about that, i'll have to go ask the dean or something for a reason and help on how i can get the next one!!

i love to meet old friends at those conferences. am having a good time when i'm not having a bad time... huhuh...

was indeed voted chair of the nnest caucus and i am FREAKING OUT about the amount of work it requires!!

found a great book about building, testing, and analyzing questionnaires. it'll help me a lot for my research and how i construct the whole study. it's using surveys in language programs, but james dean brown.

i hope i get to meet pasfolle this sunday!!!
god i hate convention centers!!!!!

et pour les ptits malins qui vont aussi sur mon autre blog, non, je ne suis pas enceinte ;) poisson d'avril!!!!