Heidi Byrnes
Research Projects, Grants, Collaboration

My interest in the adult instructed learner has led to a number of  research projects and activities:

• My most prominent activity pertaining to the advanced learner during the academic year 2004-2005 is the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, GURT 2005. I will chair this conference which takes place from March 10-13, 2005. Its theme is: Educating for Advanced Foreign Language Capacities: Constructs, Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment.
  
• The most comprehensive research project, entitled "Prototypical Performance in Writing by Curricular Level: Stages in L2 Literacy Development,"  pertains to the development of writing abilities across all curricular levels, but particularly the sequenced courses in Levels I - III and Text in Context. This project involves a team of faculty (myself, my colleague Hiram Maxim, and John Norris of the University of Hawai'i), current and past graduate students (Matthew Adams, Teodora Atanasova, Marianna Ryshina-Pankova; Shana Semler; Ellen Titzkowski), and one undergraduate student (Castle Sinicrope). 
  Collection of writing samples at the end of curricular levels began during the spring of 2000, was formalized with the completion of the department's focused work on developing writing ability in the spring of 2002 (Developing writing). and was completed in the spring of 2004.

The research addresses these questions:

1. Is syntactic complexity different across the four curricular levels I - III and Text in Context (Level IV?
   Posed another way, it is of interest to determine how well syntactic complexity can predict the curricular level of a particular student. A more detailed and more complex question is:
   
2. What kinds of syntactic complexity differences characterize the four curricular levels? and also
   
3. How do patterns of change across levels compare across different syntactic complexity variables?  Another question is:
   
4. How much of the observed results seem related to development and how much to task effect?

To begin to answer these questions, the study works with two sets of data:

1. Protoypical performance writing tasks (PPTs) regularly given at the end of curricular levels I - III and Text in Context, that is, curriculum-dependent writing tasks;
2. Data from a single Baseline writing task (BWT), which yielded curriculum-independent data from students at all curricular/acquisitional levels (I-V).

As of August 15, 2004, a total of 399 writing samples have been gathered, coded with CHILDES, analyzed statistically, and displayed in spread sheets and graphs in four groups according to curricular levels.

• Group A: all PPTs: n = 296
  Level I: 82; Level II: 95; Level III: 69: Level IV: 50
• Group B: all BWTs: n = 103
  Level I: 19; Level II: 22; Level III: 23; Level IV: 22; Level V: 17
• Group C: Overlap of A and B: n = 66
• Group D: A - C (in order to determine representativeness, within the curricular progression, of the performance of C.)

Syntactic development has been analyzed in terms of the major standard categories (e.g., T-units, mean length of T-unit, mean length of clause, clauses per T-unit) and in terms of a range of clause types.

The data set includes the longitudinal performance of 15 students whose writing development can be tracked across at least three consecutive curricular levels.

The project is supported, inpart, by a grant I received on behalf of the Department from the College Curriculum Renewal Project (2002-2004) and by departmental funds.

• In October 2002, faculty and graduates students of the German Department submitted an application to the NEH Exemplary Education Projects grant opportunity "Linking Cultural Literacy and Language Learning: A Curriculum Dissemination Project". While this proposal was not funded, informal dissemination activities continue to take place as colleagues from other institutions visit the department to get a first-hand look at the curriculum in action and as various faculty members are invited to give presentations and workshops elsewhere.
  
  
• The use of technology to enhance upper levels of acquisition is the focus of a project in Text in Context, a course I regularly teach. It explores how various forms of web-based textual markup and enhancement tools and related technologies might contribute to two central features of advanced language learning: first, a heightened awareness of the nature of text organization, and, second, the acquisition of complex webs of nuanced vocabulary within specialized themes and topics, particularly "chunks"  and collocations. This project is supported through a fellowship I hold from the Center for New Design in Learning and Scholarship, CNDLS,  2002-2004.
  
  
• The Spencer Grant (2000- 2002) under the "Practitioner Research Communication and Mentoring Grants" program and entitled "Supporting Teacher-researchers in a comprehensive curriculum renewal project in a college foreign language department" explored specific aspects of the Department's Developing Multiple LIteracies curriculum. Under the mentorship of Heidi Byrnes, John Norris, and Lourdes Ortega, now at the University of Hawai'i, three teacher-researcher teams were formed in the German Department. Respectively, these teams, primarily made up of graduate students, researched TA development in the Department's content- and genre-oriented, task-based curriculum, explored the role of genre in that curriculum, and prepared guidelines for materials development for upper levels of acquisition and instruction for college-level learners. The Spencer web page includes details of this two-year project (e.g., Year One Report, Final Report) and its findings.
  
  
• The SLA Collaborative brings together faculty in the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics who are united by their interest in second language teaching and learning;
  
  
• The GU-FLIRT research initiative, a crosslinguistic study, focuses on the advanced adult instructed learner.
  
  
• Collaborative Research between Georgetown University and Freie Universität Berlin, entitled: "Supporting the acquisition of advanced levels of competence in an L2: Comparative studies in content-oriented and genre-based instruction," is being planned with Professor Norbert Dittmar
  
  February 28, 2005