Psychophysio- logical Methods in SLA Research Session Added to MECA
University of California Los Angeles Applied and Advanced Studies in Education Assistant Professor Bahiyyih Hardacre will be presenting on “Psychophysiological Methods in Second Language Acquisition Research” on Saturday, August 19th from 2:00 pm to 2:45 pm
Studies in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have already benefited from collaborative and interdisciplinary work, drawing from research methodologies such as surveys and scales from psychology, ethnography from anthropology, conversation analysis from sociology, and neuroimaging techniques from neuroscience. Contributing to this repertoire, I record and make use of physiological data to better describe the role of the body during conversational use of language in small group interactions. Working under the assumption that language use is highly influenced by autonomic responsivity to the ongoing interaction, and in turn our bodies are constantly adapting to their surrounding environments, I am interested in how this adaptive autonomic regulation can offer new insights to the current view of the embodiment of talk (Damasio, 1994; Goodwin, 2007; Porges, 2001). More specifically, in this paper I will show how heart rate and skin conductance, the most reliable indicators of autonomic responsivity to external stimuli (Porges, 2009; Shapiro, Jammer, & Goldstein, 2001), can be synced with regular CA transcripts to bring light to key conversational behaviors, such as interjections, overlaps, onsets and ends of turn construction units, taking the floor, silences and pauses, etc. This innovative approach to scientific investigation clearly benefits SLA research because of its contribution to multi-modal discourse analysis of second language users.
Bahiyyih Hardacre, Ph.D., is originally from Brazil where she worked as an EFL teacher for 12 years at Binational Centers, at junior high and high schools, and as a certified oral examiner and rater for the University of Cambridge and Michigan ESOL proficiency exams. While residing in the United States for the past 10 years, she has coordinated ESL programs working as Director of Education and Teacher Training at language schools, and taught international students in credit and non-credit programs at the University of California Los Angeles and Santa Monica College. Besides teaching, her main research interests in TESOL and Applied Linguistics are language assessment, language and cognition, language evolution, and neurobiology of language learning and use.
She has recently co-authored two entries in Wiley’s TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (2017); one titled “Cognitive Perspectives in Teaching Speaking” and another titled “Listening and Different Age Groups.” She has a chapter in a book published by Oxford University Press, edited by Anna Joaquin and John Schumann, titled Exploring the Interactional Instinct. Foundations of Human Interaction Series (2013); the chapter is titled “The Biological and Psychological Correlates of Social Engagement Behaviors in Second Language Acquisition”. In 2011, she published an article on Issues in Applied Linguistics titled “The UCLA Test of Oral Proficiency: A model for assessing and addressing English proficiency of international teaching assistants” She is currently working on a book titled “The Embodiment of Talk: Using Psychophysiological Methods to Better Understand Linguistic Behaviors” to be published by Lexington Books.
She currently serves on the Board of Directors for CATESOL (California and Nevada Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) as College/ University Level Chair, and as Editor-in-Chief for Issues in Applied Linguistics, a well-known peer reviewed journal.