Changing Scholarly Interests!

I cannot say that my scholarly interests have changed dramatically since the start of this semester. However, I believe I have added more to the already somewhat long list of topics that attract my attention. I was lucky that I got an opportunity to work on a literature review in one of my other courses with Dr Hogue, Foundations of Literacy (EDCI 50000), and that literature review gave me a lot to ponder.

I read 7-8 articles on bi-literacy, and unpacked it under various lenses such as pedagogy, cognition and socio-cultural practices. This strategic approach opened up more avenues for me to explore. I found out that in the context of pedagogy, teachers can play a very positive role to foster and maintain our students’ bi-literacy which can have profound implications for not only our students, but also their parents and the wider community or society in general. For example, fostering bi-literacy leads to the engagement of migrant parents in the education of their children which in turn has a positive impact on the overall society. Also, bi-literacy enhances the general intellect and metalinguistic knowledge of our students which enables them to acquire literacy in their L3 a great deal faster.

Exploring bi-literacy in such a detailed manner and connecting its advantages to various educational contexts led to a number of questions that I raised at the end of my literature review. I am still not a hundred percent sure if those questions will eventually come together to help me write up my dissertation, but I think it is still a baby step in the right direction. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hello everyone!

 Hi there everyone,  My name is Muhammad Taimur Sabih. I usually go by Tim. I don't have a lot to add at this stage, but I believe I will have a bit more to say as we get through this semester.  A bit about me: I was born in Pakistan, but I have been bit of a globetrotter as my family moved to UAE when I was only 6 months old. After that, I was fortunate enough to get constant opportunities to live in countries like the UK, Australia and New Zealand before recently moving to the US. I have two Master's: MA English Literature from Greenwich University and MA TESOL from Victoria University of Wellington. I am a New Zealand citizen, and I have a very strong research interest in Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and English Language Teaching (ELT) curriculum development. This is my first year at Purdue pursuing my PhD in Language Education & Literacy.  I guess that's enough for now - more later.  Take care! Regards, Tim
Read more

My Scholarly Interests

  I have always been very passionate about curriculum writing, English Language Teaching (ELT), cultural studies, identity formation & modification, role of power in educational contexts and Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC). I know it is a pretty long list, but it doesn’t end here. Since joining Purdue, I have actually added more to it. I took a course on bilingual education and gentrification. That course gave me so much to think about, and more importantly, I was able to connect the new knowledge that I gained in the course to what I previously knew regarding the role of power, gentrification and bilingualism/multilingualism. In the future, I intend to build on all this knowledge as I endeavour to narrow down a research question or questions for my final dissertation. I would love to do something related to bi-literacy/biculturalism, identity formation/modification and perhaps, the role of curriculum or teachers in relation to that. I know it’s a lot at this sta...
Read more