Confirmed Key Note Speakers

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Gene Thompson Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan	Dominik Rumlich University of Wuppertal, Germany

 

Gene Thompson
Associate Professor, Department of Global Business, Rikkyo University

Getting started as an early career researcher

If you are attending this conference, you are going through the process of becoming a researcher in the field of Applied Linguistics. It’s an exciting and scary process that involves joining a community of established scholars – and being able to contribute to the development of knowledge within the field. In order to kick off the JRM, I will discuss my experiences as a junior researcher to discuss actions that early career researchers can take in order to develop skills and strengthen their confidence. The talk will focus upon two major areas:  

1. Developing confidence as a PhD student and early career researcher
2. Getting established as an early career researcher, including the process of getting published

This talk starts a discussion about the various challenges that early career professionals face, and aims to develop agency in participants, by discussing how early career researchers can maximize the opportunities available to them during the process of joining the research community.

 

Bio:

Gene Thompson has been working in language education for more than 18 years. He is primarily interested in teacher and learner cognitions about language learning, content and language-integrated learning, English-medium instruction, and self-access learning. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Business at Rikkyo University, Japan. He coordinates courses in the Bilingual Business Leader Program (one of the few bilingual business degrees programs in Asia) and in the Master in International Business Program (one of the few English-medium graduate business programs in Japan). His recent work is focused on the integration of content and language learning within programs where English is used an international language. In 2018 he had two chapters published in The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching and has forthcoming publications in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education and the Asian ESP Journal. He also has published about language teacher development and self-access learning in journals such as Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching and Studies in Self-Access Learning.

Gene has a PhD in Education from Queensland University of Technology, Australia. His PhD dissertation "Japanese high school English teachers' self-efficacy beliefs about teaching English" received an outstanding doctoral thesis award from Queensland University of Technology in 2016 and was nominated for the 2017 Australian Association for Research in Education Ray Debus Award.

Dominik Rumlich
Deputy chair of psycholinguistics and second language acquisition, University of Wuppertal

Quantitative research: Examining a world full of significance from a bird’s-eye-view

Even though you might not use quantitative methods in your PhD study, there is no doubt that researchers need to be able to understand and critically evaluate quantitative research. If you would like to employ corresponding methods yourself, it becomes even more important to develop a sound understanding of their underlying rationale, their strengths, and weaknesses before you actually learn about concrete methods or statistical procedures. Hence, this talk will not rely on textbook knowledge and illustrate how to do things, but its main idea will be to help you develop the big picture, i.e. help you understand the logic of quantitative methods/statistics and how they “think”, rather than the methods and statistical procedures themselves.

Therefore, my talk will pursue three major aims:

1. Creating/reactivating basic knowledge with concrete examples from my own research to set the scene
2. Fostering critical reflection on strengths and weaknesses of quantitative methods.
3. Taking a look behind the scenes of significance testing. i.e. demystifying and breaking down a simple mathematical idea everyone can understand.

It is going to be a special talk geared towards up and coming researchers in the area of languages and I will share insights from my own personal history as a researcher. It had its origin at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2009 and began with a leaflet on my desk advertising the second AILA Junior Research Meeting at the University of Münster, my current employer.

 

Bio:

Dr. Dominik Rumlich is junior/associate professor of TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) at the University of Münster, Germany, and works as a teacher of English at Hittorf-Gymnasium in Recklinghausen. In 2017, he was deputy chair of psycholinguistics, second language acquisition (including TEFL) at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. Before his appointment as professor, he pursued his PhD studies in the field of CLIL as a junior lecturer at the University of Duisburg-Essen from 2009-2016, where he obtained his teacher’s degree/first state exam for the subjects of English and geography. His areas of teaching and research include CLIL, assessment, affective-motivational determinants of language learning (esp. EFL self-concept and interest), learning strategies, and empirical research methods (esp. quantitative). He is currently involved in multiple research projects on CLIL, assessment, young adult fiction in the language classroom, the transition between primary and secondary school and teacher education. His statistical inclination came to fruition in the course of his two-year quasi-experimental PhD study with 1,400 students, for which he got nicknamed “Mr. Data” by his supervisor Prof. Dr. Bernd Rüschoff (Dusiburg-Essen).