一、时间

2016年11月13日 （星期日）上午08:30-09:20
二、地点

重庆大学虎溪校区图书馆大报告厅
三、主题

Opening up the science: Methods in second language acquisition research

（第二语言习得研究方法）
四、主讲嘉宾

Emma Marsden博士，英国约克大学

主讲嘉宾介绍

Emma Marsden has been Senior Lecturer at the University of York UK since 2011. She completed an MA, PhD and post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Southampton, UK. Her expertise includes the acquisition of morphosyntax and grammar teaching. With her collaborators, she has carried out many classroom and laboratory studies investigating how learners process the input and the extent to which such processing can be manipulated and combined with explicit information to improve learning. Emma also publishes and leads funded projects on research methods, experimental design, and transparency. She is director of IRIS, the international repository for research materials in second language research. IRIS makes over 700 data collection tools openly available and provides a focal point for evaluating research methods in SLA. Emma has also driven forward open collaboration via international multi-site replication. She is Associate Editor of Language Learning, co-author of a popular text book Second Language Learning Theories, and has published research in journals such as Second Language Research, The Modern Language Journal, Language Learning, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. Emma started her career as a French and Spanish teacher in a secondary school in the UK, and has taught English in France, Spain and Chile. She is now active in communicating research to teachers, teacher educators and policy-makers, and has held invited advisory roles for national language education policy.

内容简介
The open science movement is gaining momentum in many disciplines, with researchers gradually becoming more transparent with their methods, data and reporting practices. Driven in part by a social equality agenda to increase the reach of research to wider audiences, this movement is also driven by the conviction that open practice improves the quality, quantity and scope of research. In this talk, I will describe and evaluate a series of initiatives in SLA research that have aimed to do just that, focusing on the centrality of transparent methods in the research process. The three types of projects I discuss each aim, in different ways, to move research towards a more community-based, etic perspective, rather than the more individualistic approach to date that has tended to rely on small-scale studies for testing learning theories and evaluating teaching interventions.

i) The IRIS repository. Established in 2012, IRIS (iris-database.org) now holds over 2200 materials used to collect data for peer-reviewed published research (Marsden, Mackey & Plonsky 2015). By working with journal editors, it is changing the way research is presented and accessed. Over 13,000 downloads, from students, researchers, language teachers and teacher educators demonstrate the need for this resource.I describe and evaluate the content and use of IRIS to date, and consider the extent to which it is unique in the context of other open access repositories in SLA. Two key motivations behind IRIS are to promote rigour in instrumentation and replication, the foci of the next parts of my talk.

ii) Rigour in instrumentation. One of the most common research tools in SLA research is the grammaticality (or acceptability) judgment test (GJT), used to elicit learners’ inferences and sensitivity about target and non-target language. Closely related to this technique is the increasingly common, computer-delivered self-paced reading test (SPR). At a finer-grained level, this also assesses sensitivity to grammaticality, but using reaction times. I will present key findings from two ongoing systematic reviews of these techniques, including over 400 GJTs (Plonsky, Marsden, Gass, Spinner, Crowther) and 80 SPRs (Marsden, Thompson, Plonsky). We evaluate reporting practices, design features, and rigour associated with these tools, drawing out historical trends and recommendations for the future. Critically, given existing evidence that open science can improve the quality and reporting of research (Wagner, 2010; Wicherts, Bakker & Molenaar, 2011; Piwowar & Vision, 2013), we also discuss any benefits associated with GJTs and SPRs held on IRIS compared to those that are not transparent.
iii) Replication. Another benefit of transparent materials is facilitating replication. The importance of shared materials for replication becomes clear when methodological differences between closely related studies have led to theoretical controversy. I illustrate this by discussing a large, international multi-site replication project (n=587) across seven sites (Morgan-Short, Marsden, Heil, et al. https://osf.io/7y8hu/). These were conceptual replications of VanPatten (1990) and quasi-replications of Leow et al. (2008), investigating the extent to which attending to form can interfere with comprehension. The general finding, of little or no interference, in the oral or written modality, has consequences for the theoretical underpinnings of a widely-known grammar teaching technique, Processing Instruction.

Such open-access multi-site replication projects are highly visible in Psychology. To understand the nature of replication efforts in our own field, the final part of my talk will highlight preliminary findings of a scoping review of approximately 60 studies self-labelling as replication (Marsden, Morgan-Short, Plonsky, ongoing). We consider how the relatively limited range of research domains in which replication has happened to date might be enhanced, by researchers adopting a more transparent approach to methods, data and analysis.

In sum, the open science movement is not without its critics (Osborne, 2013; Vincent & Wickham 2013), as well as its silent abstainers. However, these arguments relate almost exclusively to publication. In this talk, I hope to demonstrate that there are very few, if any, valid arguments against increased transparency of methods.