ENGL685 #7 - Megapost! Transform and Roll Out!

I'm a bad so I'm rolling the last two annotated bibs into one because I'm still confused on what I'm doing


I owe you 7 entries the sadness abounds. This will be updated in the next few days to squeeze them all in. 

Deadline for this post's contents is 2/15. All subsequent ABs will have their own post.

• Silver, R., Hu, G., & Iino, M. (2002). English Language Education in China, Japan, and Singapore. Graduate Programmes and Research Office, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University.

• In this work, Silver, Hu, and Iino write three pieces, each giving a detailed history of educational policy about teaching English has mutated since being included in the official government-recommended curriculum. In particular, Hu includes a timeline of government-recommended syllabus changes that took place in China from around the 60s to the 2000s. This is an excellent resource since it lets me look out how an Asian value system changed academic goals in one country. I still have to allow for cultural differences, but such changes may be trackable through Japan's academic history too.

• While mostly the outlining of Japan (located in the center of the book) will probably be useful to me, the other two papers book-ending it help to provide an overarching narrative for English language education in Japan, China, and Singapore. This contextual timeline building seats national goals in place with one another, as well as nicely contrasts the 3 education system styles of each country. While I feel that Japan's insistence on only using Ministry of Education approved textbooks (there are 5- 1 of them is used in over half of all secondary schools) and "teaching to the test" style English education policy could use more digging into, this is an excellent beginning resource for foundational intercultural knowledge.

• Baecker, D. L. (1998). Uncovering the Rhetoric of the Syllabus: The Case of the Missing I. College Teaching, 46(2), 58–62.

•  Baecker (not a typo) is (was) a Doctoral candidate in South Carolina at the time of writing this article. Considering that was years ago, I reckon she's graduated by now. The non-specific theory application of this article is definitely a point in its favor. It mostly discuses language use in the syllabus and how it communicates and distributes authority. For example, when a professor overwhelmingly uses 'you" (as most did) it can come off authoritarian and leave students feeling as if there is no sense of community. Additionally, the attempt to use the royal "we" (inclusive of the instructor) is just as dangerous. When syllabi claim "we" will learn new skills and strategies, the student can usually assume that, since the teacher is at the helm of the class, their development has finished in these areas. The false community created through this type of language use smacks of dishonesty and leads to a diminished sense of responsibility on the part of the professor.

• This will likely be folded into my 'Methods' section, where I evaluate language usage as a rhetorical tool trending towards an end goal of increased comprehension. It has been a challenge thusfar to find a wholesale analysis of 'good' syllabus rhetoric analysis, so I will have to assemble its working parts peacemeal. One of many.

• Parkes, J., & Harris, M. B. (2002). The Purposes of a Syllabus. College Teaching, 50(2), 55–61.

• My favorite of the Sunday roundup. This piece dictates the three types of syllabi (as recorded in the authors' study) as Contractual, Permanent Record, and Learning Tool. These three classifications give me a nice categorical starting place for looking into the differences in syllabi, and also a point of comparison, since it is yet to see whether a Japanese syllabus fits into any one of these three categories (or multiple categories). Additionally, this work is an absolute treasure trove of resources. They list several parenthetical sources related directly to syllabus research and state outright that, in 2002, they had been unable to locate /any/ studies done on syllabus composition and its effect on student comprehension. Coming from a Professor of Psychology and a Professor Emerita, that carries quite a bit of weight. It also says that I should be looking for resources post-2002 as I forge ahead.

• This will likely be another part of my methods, since I definitely need more ground to stand on before I pull naming categories and text-structure conventions out of thin air. Other sources I hope to investigate soon will probably have more to do with usability and the link between page layout and comprehension (since I know there's some data out there on that outside of an academic setting).

• Riches, D. (2006). Innovating English Language Education by Looking beyond the Syllabus of the Typical Japanese University English Program. Seijo University, Social Innovation Studies, 1(2), 75–92.

• An excellent look at /why/ Japanese ELE is the way it is. This source focuses a lot on the reason Japanese English classes are structured with such a limited focus on useful English (or, I guess, creating fluent English speakers) and more on a certain size vocabulary. The terribly difficult entrance examinations that stand between graduating High School students and their college education are the focus of most teaching, and every little attention is paid to whether or not the material is interesting to students, or even very practical outside of a test.

• This will be a part of my recommendations section in the end. Ideally, I will be able to hybridize US and JP syllabi with an equal focus in practicality and test-passing. If this seems impossible (whenever I get my hands on first-hand resources), then I can at least use this to recommend how to change the system towards a more student-friendly mode of learning.

• Kostelnick, C. (1990). The Rhetoric of Text Design in Professional Communication. Technical Writing Teacher, 17(3), 189–202.

• Finally, a source not about syllabi, or Japanese education, but pure, textual rhetoric RE: document design. This is an oldie but goodie. Although some syllabi are delivered digitally now (something which wasn't a thing in 1996), Dr. Kostelnick's theories on the rhetoric behind a coherent document do not suffer in meaning, whether viewed in print or on a screen. The best sections in this piece discuss how headings, bullets, and page design effect how the reader will understand and chunk page information, how bolding, italics, and underlining affect conveyed meaning, and how charts and their placement can vary greatly in meaning just depending on layout.

• This is in the set of sources I'm preparing to analyze US syllabi at the University level, but I also hope to use these to find commonality between JP/US. My sincere hope (and, I guess, hypothesis) is that, although the contents focus and intended use of the syllabus may vary highly between countries, their visual layout and use of spatial and intra/extra-textual rhetoric will be very similar. Fingers crossed- my contact contacted me yesterday with word that I should have a primary source or two soon.

• Kostelnick, C. (1996). Supra-Textual Design: The Visual Rhetoric of Whole Documents. Technical Communication Quarterly, 5(1), 9–33. doi:10.1207/s15427625tcq0501_2

• Another Kostelnick! What a rascal. This piece is a kind of continuation of the source above- a good deal of it goes back into spacial, textual, and graphic design and how this affects a created text. What makes this source better on that front is, since it doesn't spend as much time defining these things, it takes /extra/ time giving examples of how three different real-life documents go about performance in each category, and how to parse out the rhetorical intention of their design. There's also a section on Stylistic Functions, which is basically 'why presentation matters'. It ties nicely into the already defined categories, while providing a 'why do I care' (which, y'know, not all academic writers do).

• The examples in this piece actually helped solidify some of the things I read in his slightly smaller work. This one more explicitly talks about issues like page size, portability, tone, and  context, then gives good examples. One of the example works actually uses a brown recycled paper, which I would have assumed would be a no-go if you were trying to look professional. Kostelnick points out that, since /contextually/ the paper choice is relevant to the subject matter, it's a-ok. Because thematic matching. Mind. Blown.