Learner voice and agency in ESP nursing : A narrative exploration

This paper takes a narrative inquiry approach to investigating nursing undergraduate student goals and impressions of their first year English ESP course at the University of Toyama. The data informing this investigation is comprised of student reflective writing, completed as homework as part of their normal coursework, from the beginning and end of their first semester at university. The objective of this investigation is to base descriptions of students’ motivations, hopes and experiences of the course in their own words and from their perspective rather than to force their discourses into preassigned categories or claim their narratives are representative of a larger population of which they are considered a representative subset. The motivation informing this research is twofold. First, it is research in context.There is a considerable amount of literature investigating the motivation of English as a foreign language (EFL) students, but that literature tends to decontextualize students, conducting surveys across institutional, social, and national contexts in order to create representations of an ideal learner to which to aspire or to discern characteristics of successful and unsuccessful learners (for a review of such literature, see Dörnyei, 2005; Irie, 2003). Such research, by its very nature, seeks the “simplification and reduction of complexity” (Blommaert & Dong, 2011, p. 11), yet the actual classroom as experienced by individual teachers and students is comprised of specific people with disparate motivations and goals acting in a social mileu where their characterizations in the research do not necessarily represent who they really are as unique personalities, a point Dörnyei (2005) acknowledges. Thus this investigation takes as a given the inherent complexity of so many different individuals interacting within the social space of the EFL classroom and seeks to explicate what their experiences of one particular course were for them. Second, much of the research into student motivation and experience of English learning tends to fit students into categories that are metaphorically static, such as national identity, current stage of schooling, age, or particular states of personality variables (Dörnyei, 2005; Irie, 2003), which represents a “territorial” (Clark, 1998, p. 11) metaphor for the learning experience. In contrast, this paper contextualizes the actors’ learning experiences as “transient” (Clark, 1998, p. 12), where classroom participants are envisioned as moving to and through the physical space of the classroom and the metaphorical space of English, English speaking, and the different cultural implications embedded in the learning of English. Thus, while these learners are Japanese, it is not their Japanese-ness that is of interest in this report, but what they see as important to them in their journey to and through the course (and beyond), based on their accounts of their hopes for and experiences of this class and what relevance they see those as having to their previous and future experiences. After all, almost all current university students are former high school students and future adult learners, thus where they happen to be at the time of data collection isn’t nearly as important as seeing them as moving through an “expansive space” (Clark, 1998, p. 12) where “in their interactions, they travel” (Clark, 1998, p. 12). In so doing, one objective is to present findings that are “accessible and meaningful for teachers” (Mitchell & Myles, 1998, p. 31) and to bring “forward into the SLA [second language acquisition] dialogue the perspectives of...learners” (Steinman, 2005, p. 69). Thus learners’ voices and issues are foregrounded in the discussion presented here

An Exploration of the Experiences of Japan-Based English Language Teachers Writing for Academic Publication

This thesis examines knowledge production practices within higher education by exploring the experiences of Japan-based language teachers writing for academic publication. Global practices of knowledge production as encoded in high-prestige published academic texts are of ongoing research interest. However, the exploration of author practices of writing for academic publication is a relatively new area of interest which I pursue in this thesis. The investigation of the writing for academic publication practices of Japan-based language teachers presented here helps to further expand the empirical research base and facilitates critical examination of the processes underlying writing for academic publication more broadly. This thesis is primarily based on research into the writing for publication practices of seven Japan-based authors, exploring why they write for academic publication and the practices that underlie their writing. The study employs an ethnographically informed methodology, incorporating multiple sources of data, including interviews, different versions of manuscripts submitted for publication, and the correspondence surrounding those manuscripts. These multiple sources facilitate exploring the complex processes behind writing for academic publication. Methodological tools from academic literacies and critical discourse analysis are applied to examine the authors’ writing for academic publication practices and the processes their manuscripts go through during submission, review, and revision along their trajectories toward publication. This thesis illustrates the hidden complexities underlying academic knowledge production and examines the processes that shape what can be and is published. Key findings include the heterogeneity of writing for publication practices among the authors, the complexity of the trajectories of published manuscripts, and how the ideologies expressed in the authors’ published manuscripts have been shaped by the review and revision process. A key contribution of the thesis is the methodology developed to investigate writing for academic publication practices, specifically regarding analysis of text publication trajectories

Faculty Publication Trends in a Japanese National University’s Medical Faculty: A Preliminary Diachronic Comparison

This paper presents a diachronic analysis of publication frequency and language medium for a Japanese national university’s medical faculty. Studies of trends in global writing for academic publication tend to implicate English language publication frequency increasing at the expense of publishing in national languages (Bennet, 2014). However, while increases in English language publication have been demonstrated (Fire & Guestrin, 2019), there remains little quantitative analysis of how the language publication practices of university faculty from outside the Anglophone center of higher education have changed, with Kyvik (1990, 2003), Daizen (2015), and Huang (2015) being notable exceptions. Here we diachronically analyze publication reports for a Japanese university’s medical faculty, examining annual university publication reports across two time periods, 1979 to 1980 and 2017 to 2018 for three medical subspecialties; biochemistry, internal medicine, and pathology. Across the subspecialties, English language publication in the most prestigious publication type, original journal articles, has largely come at the expense of Japanese language publication, with Japanese publications and English publications switching places in terms of frequency of publication between 1979 to 1980 and 2017 to 2018. However, less prestigious publication types have increased for both Japanese and English, suggesting that professional communication in Japanese remains important

Report on the International Symposium for Practice and Application of Philosophical Dialogue Organized by the Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences

2019年3月17、18日に、富山大学教養教育院主催、国際機構共催、男女共同参画推進室、Wallonie-Bruxelles International（ベルギー）協賛、富山市教育委員会、富山県教育委員会後援のもと、教育手法として世界的に注目されている「哲学対話」をテーマとするシンポジウムとワークショップを黒田講堂において開催した。「哲学対話」の研究者であり実践者である中岡成文氏、Nathalie Frieden氏、Denis Pieret氏による講演のほか、「哲学対話」を実際に行うワークショップには、学内のみならず全国各地から参加者が集まり、全体会議の時間には活発な議論が交わされた。本報告では、この企画の目的、開催までの準備状況、当日の概要、得られた成果を記録し、本学における教養教育に今後どのように活かしうるかについて、展望を示す

One Health – an Ecological and Evolutionary Framework for tackling Neglected Zoonotic Diseases

Understanding the complex population biology and transmission ecology of multihost parasites has been declared as one of the major challenges of biomedical sciences for the 21st century and the Neglected Zoonotic Diseases (NZDs) are perhaps the most neglected of all the Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). Here we consider how multihost parasite transmission and evolutionary dynamics may affect the success of human and animal disease control programmes, particularly neglected diseases of the developing world. We review the different types of zoonotic interactions that occur, both ecological and evolutionary, their potential relevance for current human control activities, and make suggestions for the development of an empirical evidence base and theoretical framework to better understand and predict the outcome of such interactions. In particular, we consider whether preventive chemotherapy, the current mainstay of NTD control, can be successful without a One Health approach. Transmission within and between animal reservoirs and humans can have important ecological and evolutionary consequences, driving the evolution and establishment of drug resistance, as well as providing selective pressures for spill‐over, host switching, hybridizations and introgressions between animal and human parasites. Our aim here is to highlight the importance of both elucidating disease ecology, including identifying key hosts and tailoring control effort accordingly, and understanding parasite evolution, such as precisely how infectious agents may respond and adapt to anthropogenic change. Both elements are essential if we are to alleviate disease risks from NZDs in humans, domestic animals and wildlife