Michael Holsworth: I’d like to know a little more about yourself. Would you mind sharing how you got started with SLA research?
Judy Noguchi: I got into English teaching through the back door. After graduating with BS and BA degrees in chemistry, I came to Japan and got married to a guy I had met when I was traveling in Japan. He waited for two years while I finished my degree. So here I was in Japan with practically no Japanese language ability which made it impossible to do anything with my chem degree. People would say, “Why don’t you teach English?” But that was the last thing I wanted to do! However, someone said, “Would you teach English for chemistry to chem majors?” To that, I could not say no.
But at the time, there were no textbooks for such a job. And there wasn’t even tried and true teaching methods. I did manage to find a textbook on basic English for science, but the grammar material was too easy for the students, and the listening exercises were too difficult.
So, I wrote to my mom and had her send me my old chem textbooks. I picked out basic contents such as a chapter on the organic double bonds, one on the principles of thin layer chromatography, and a lab manual section on the synthesis of aspirin. Those around me said, “Those kids can’t even say ‘hello, how are you?’ in English. How are they going to handle that stuff?” Well, when I showed the materials to the class, they said, “Oh, yeah, we learned that last week in organic,” or “we did that synthesis in lab.” “So that’s how you say that in English.” I never turned back.
For those who are unfamiliar, could you briefly explain ESP?
ESP, English for specific purposes, is basically an academic discipline which combines teaching and applied linguistics concepts to help learners acquire practical language and communication skills for specific situations. ESP began over 50 years ago as a way of teaching nonnative English speakers the language of professionals but today can offer ideas and methods for teaching communications skills to native English speakers. This is because ESP has “no native speakers.” Even if you are a native speaker of English, if you are not a physician, you probably would not be able to go into a medical conference and actively participate in the discussion. ESP requires a systemic literacy of the communication situation, or put another way, ESP requires a working knowledge of the language of a given discourse community.
What first drew your attention to ESP?
My first major was chemistry and after moving to Japan, I started doing the English editing of research paper manuscripts for Japanese scientists. I began to realize the importance of language skills in professional communication. When I entered the M.Ed. program at Temple University Japan, I did all of my assignments from an ESP viewpoint.
Prior to this, I had attended a week-long seminar at the University of Michigan on the teaching of English to engineering students. The guest lecturer was John Swales, who later wrote the seminal book that established the field—Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (1990). At the time that I first met him, he was pondering on what was happening in the introduction sections of research papers. He was trying to identify the types of information that were being presented. When I heard him talk about it, my first impression, from a science background, was “Of course, that’s what you need to write to introduce your research. That’s how scientists think!” When his book came out and everyone raved about it, I realized that these thought processes needed to be made evident in order to be able to teach them.
You have an impressive list of publications? Is there one that stands out to you? Why?
My work on the science review article, which was the theme of my PhD dissertation. By the way, John Swales expressed a desire to be the external examiner for my viva voce (the oral defense examination in the British system). I was a bit overwhelmed but figured that if he approved it, what I was saying would not be too off course.
I have been following the state of the “review article” for the past thirty or so years. And have written chapters in books about the changing landscape of knowledge construction in the sciences. The communication systems now in place have changed everything and will continue to do so in the future. We need new ways to curate the information being produced in order to be able to separate the “wheat from the chaff” for the further construction of our knowledge systems.
What advice would you give to new researchers to the field of ESP?
While you do not need to be an expert in a specific disciplinary field, you do need to have a grasp of how the people in it think. Get real world experience outside of academia. You do not need medical training to teach physicians how to write up their research, but you should have an understanding of how medical scientists think about research.
You also should have a good grasp of how to analyze and operationalize the communication needs of your target learners.
Your plenary presentation at the JALT 2023 conference was very interesting. It provided the audience with a clear way to connect real world issues with practical applications in SLA and ESP. Is there a main take away message that you hope your audience got?
Learning is literally something that you need to do continuously until it is time to finally go, like Hokusai. I teach grad students in rehabilitation sciences. This means that I read the papers they are reading and writing. Everything points to the need to keep active, not only physically but mentally as well as socially (Lane et al., 2020).
You discussed the needed shift from propositional knowledge to procedural knowledge. Can you explain this briefly for the readers and provide advice on how one can make this shift?
Propositional knowledge is what you can get from books or ChatGPT. Procedural knowledge is how you can use the propositional knowledge to do something. In December, I attended a seminar on data science. Michiko Watanabe of Rissho University talked about the difference between the transmission model of learning, which is basically teaching propositional knowledge, and a constructive, collaborative, and cooperative learning model to be able to create value. It is this latter hands-on type of learning that motivates people to keep learning. She said that, for example, rather than have the students learn about Python and other math details first, tell them what they can do with the data that they can get from doing programming. Then they will want to learn how to get at the data.
The idea is not new. Confucius said, “I hear, and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” More recently, research is showing that multisensory learning seems to improve memory performance (Okray et al., 2023).
You stressed the importance of communication as the way to engage and address global issues, and how ESP can help us through a discourse community, genres, and corpus linguistics. Would you mind speaking a little more about these three components of ESP?
The discourse community is the audience you want to reach. I have my grad students talk about their PhD research as a 3MT presentation to learn how to adjust the level of their explanation to the audience (University of Queensland, n.d.). For this, they need to explain, in just three minutes, what they are trying to do and its value to the other students in the class who are all working on different projects. This is learning how to explain your work to those outside your field.
I also have them talk about their research as though it was going to be presented on TV news. As Albert Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simple, you don’t understand it well enough.” See the YouTube video by Levy (Wired, 2023) for experts explaining complex things at five different levels: to a child, a teenager, a college student, a grad student, and an expert in the same field.
Genres are simply the different types of texts that people use for communication. During the recent Noto Peninsula earthquake, the TV announcer kept shouting, “There is a tsunami coming. Get yourself to higher ground.” No honorifics, which is unusual for Japanese TV. No other details. She kept repeating the message.
What message do you need to get across and what is the best way to do it? Specific formats arise to fit the communication needs. When John Swales was pondering on what was going on in research article introductions, I was thinking, of course, you must explain why the research needs to be done, what we already know about it, what we still don’t know and what was done in the study being reported. That’s how a scientist approaches a research project.
Corpus linguistics is the basis for examples of how language is actually used. If you need to write a research article on a specific topic, developing a dedicated corpus of articles in that specific area, can help you understand how things are expressed in that particular field. By the way, that’s also how the generative AI models work, although they do not understand the content. They are simply working with large language model algorithms to predict the most commonly used patterns of expression.
An example of student feedback from a recent ESP class mine include the following:
The class underscored the importance of structured writing in academic papers. Previously, while I sensed an underlying structure in scholarly articles, my writing primarily focused on expressing my ideas smoothly. This course illuminated that each sentence in academic writing serves a specific purpose, following a move-by-move approach. Realizing this, I revisited various articles and observed a consistent pattern. This revelation has encouraged me to adopt a similar structured approach in my writing, which I believe will not only improve the organization of my papers, but also clarify my thoughts.
You discussed two very useful acronyms that the readers may not be familiar with. OCHA (observe, classify, hypothesize, apply) as a process to great good PAIL (purpose, audience, information, language features) text. Can you give an example of how readers could apply these?
If you were going to try to explain how to make okonomiyaki to someone who had never had it before, how would you do it? If you needed to send the recipe to someone in the US, you should observe recipes written in English, classify the different features (a list of ingredients and their amounts, followed by the command form verb structures for the directions), hypothesize about how you are going to present the information you want to share, and then apply what you have observed to prepare the recipe.
What do you observe? The purpose of the recipe and who your audience is. Let’s say it’s an aunt who lives in the countryside in Idaho. What kind of information would you need to provide? If she lives near a store that sells Asian foods, then she could probably get katsuobushi (bonito flakes) to top the okonomiyaki. But if there is no nearby place that she can get it, then you could offer possible alternatives, or try to explain what the katsuobushi can add to the dish. Of course, she might also be able to order it online. Finally, what language features would you use to describe the ingredients and process. You would need the proper verbs to talk about the cooking process. And they would be used in the command form in short sentences that are ordered in the chronological order in which each action should be performed.
Thank you so much for doing this interview today. Are there any last words of wisdom that you would like to share?
To be a good teacher, you yourself should be a good learner. Keep learning in order to keep teaching.
References
Lane, A. P., Wong, C. H., Močnik, Š., Song, S., & Yuen, B. (2020). Association of neighborhood social capital with quality of life among older people in Singapore. Journal of aging and health, 32(7–8), 841–850. https://doi.org/10.1177/0898264319857990
Wired. (2023, December 19). Chess Pro Explains Chess in 5 Levels of Difficulty (ft. GothamChess) [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/T1RJyn7qBUM?si=Y9vc9qyJ_y8pvebS
Noguchi J., & Kunioshi, N. (2022). Genre-based, corpus-supported writing courses for science and engineering students at Japanese universities. In G. Hill, J. Falout, & M. Apple (Eds.), STEM English in Japan (pp. 117–136). Palgrave Macmillan Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11116-7
Okray, Z., Jacob, P. F., Stern, C., Desmond, K., Otto, N., Talbot, C. B., & Waddell, S. (2023). Multisensory learning binds neurons into a cross-modal memory engram. Nature, 617, 777–784. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06013-8
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press.
The University of Queensland. (n.d.). Higher Degrees by Research…Start Your 3MT Journey Here. https://threeminutethesis.uq.edu.au/higher-degrees-researchstart-your-3m...
