Hello and welcome, my name is Paul Quinn.
I have been teaching EFL and ESL since 1995. After a decade in Japan of being a language teacher and learner, I entered the graduate program offered by the Modern Language Centre in Second Language Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto, with Professor Merrill Swain as my academic advisor. After completing my M.A. I was fortunate enough to be accepted into the Ph.D. program, with Professor Nina Spada as my academic advisior. It has been my good fortune to have presented papers at the American Association for Applied Linguistics conferences several times now, and I am looking forward to giving a poster presentation at the Second Language Research Forum at Michigan State University this fall. For the last few years I have been working with the Spada research group investigating timing issues involved with form-focussed instruction.
Now, with all of that self-aggrandizement done, I can tell you that I am hoping to use this Blog as a means of summarizing my thoughts on issues that are important for me in the area of second language acquistion and pedagogy. I am particularly interested in preparing myself for the comprehensive examinations that I will face in about a half a year from now. It helps me to organize my thoughts when I feel like I am writing for someone else who may not be clear on what I hope I have learned. I hope that this will be as helpful for those who see it as it will be for me to produce it.
I am fascinated by how language can be learned through learner production and interlocutor feedback. My M.A. thesis featured two "Japanese language tourists" and their efforts to learn English during their period of study abroad in Toronto. I was specifically interested in what kind of potential opportunities they would have to learn language through the three tennents of Swain's (1985, 1995, 2005) output hypothesis: noticing, hypothesis testing, and metalinguistic analysis. I video taped and analyzed samples of their life in and out of the language classroom and asked them to keep learner diaries. It was a fascinating study. Through that experience, my course work and my work with the Spada research group my interest in how learning occurs became even more compelling.
The life I have been leading for the past few years has provided me with some tremendous chances to meet and talk with some of the most important researchers in the field of SLA. In my conversations with these individuals I have been quite happy to have found a shared goal of getting what the field has to offer out there for those who are interested in using it to advance the effectiveness with which languages are taught. I hope to use this blog to try to to make the second language acquistion field accessible and interesting to teachers, students, researchers, and others who may find it useful. I hope to do so in the traditional manner of citing resources, reporting finidngs, summarizing theory etc. However, I also hope to include the human side of the field by sharing experiences related to the people in the field and perhaps providing insights by relaying information that does not come out in the pages of MLJ, SSLA, or TQ. When things are interesting, I find learning goes much more smoothly. If you have made it to the end of my rambling introduction, then you are probably doing a double taske over the last line.
