Challenges of PhD

My first week with Future Learn's course from the University of Leicester "Discovering your PhD Potential" is complete except for writing this blog.

The first steps to writing my PhD proposal are to find a university and supervisor that can best assist in honing my research question for future study and research. Having already initiated a research project with SFU and TWU in developing pragmatic competence in non-native English speakers, my role as principal investigator has required me to formulate research questions and design methods for data collection and analysis, which culminated in a successful REB proposal.  This will make applying to the SFU, UBC, McGill, McMaster or U of T linguistics departments much smoother. Some other options are the University of Glasgow and the School and Language and Communication at Cardiff.   Serendipitously, I found some professors in the SFU linguistics department who are researching my interests, namely in SLA, language cognition and discourse analysis and pragmatics. They also have some specialists in psycholinguistics.  Oddly enough, it doesn't appear that SFU or UBC approach a PhD with finding a supervisor first, but rather you enroll in the university first, and then are assigned a supervisor.  What the dingle!!  I have forgotten about Zoltan Dörnyei at the University of Nottingham.  Their prospectus is here.  He is one of the only active psycholinguists who also seriously studies Scripture. He states, "Regarding biblical interpretation, I am interested in a canonical narrative analysis of the biblical corpus, focusing on optimal human conduct in the face of various corporeal, societal and spiritual challenges."

However, this won't be easy.   Challenges to doing a PhD are the time and money required, as well as the motivation.  Teaching English is part of my life, but music is another big part, and I don't want to shove it to the margins.  I really need to consider my career path and explore that right now.  Doing this free online course is helping me with that, and it is really a God-send in giving me the information needed to make a reasonable decision.  Reconstructing my voice is taking time, and the best years of singing lay ahead of me - do I want to sacrifice that? What will contribute most to the Kingdom of God and society around me?  This will take much consideration, research and prayer.   Whatever I decide, I will not let myself off the hook, and will continue with due diligence.

So what do I think my research will contribute to society?  Without having started a PhD, it already has much potential in helping second English speakers, providing research fodder for TWU MA TESOL candidates, adding to professional knowledge, and raising the profile of ELC at SFU, which will help everyone across the board.  Do I need to augment this by making a big thing of it and do a PhD?  Other than providing a road to advance my career and open future doors, I cannot say how my research will directly impact society, but it will impact the second language teaching community and the language learners themselves.  The research spin-offs would be "bread from heaven" sustaining my career path.  It is probably best not to foresee into the future ocular, as when I did that with my MA, I almost gave up.  Doing the next step towards completing a large goal is always wisest.

How do I think my singing would contribute to society?  It already has, is and will keep blessing others.  The question is, in what capacity?  If I give full reign to it, it may lead me to do things that are out of character for me, like singing Verdi's Abigaille or Lady Macbeth.  If I need to do this for a living, that is where it may lead, to being constrained by the market and a loss of freedom. Right now it is a passion and an avocation.  However, with no real need or time allocated to singing other than teaching voice, am I really using this gift?  Singing in a choir is passé, as other singers tell me, and they are mostly right.  As a social activity it isn't even fun, since it is too big and anonymous. However, the freedom to give yourself to doing a brave and brilliant performance of something like Bach's B minor Mass is never to be passed up.

This has been a revealing blog.  I am writing down what I really think, have been given and have discovered so far. Ultimately, the course of my life is offered up to God for reference to what is on His priority list.  My gifts and abilities are His, and I offer them up for His use.

#FLcoursetag, #PhD

Why Do a PhD?

I am enrolled in a free online course with Future Learn through the University of Leicester to find out if doing a PhD would be a good thing for me.  Currently I am enrolled in a research project at my workplace in the exciting field of applied linguistics in developing oral skills pragmatics in English second language speakers.  The proposal is accepted and I am excited.  It should lead to a published paper, and with that further research possibilities and open doors.

Here are some reasons I may want to consider this challenge:

• to contribute to academic and social scientific discovery and knowledge;
• as a first major step towards a career as an academic or a researcher;
• to build substantially on knowledge already gained from previous study and experience
• to develop and enhance my independent and team-based research skills;
• to make an impact upon social or economic policy and practice;
• to provide a launchpad for entering a related profession;
• to lead innovation in the language teaching field

This is the first entry of my reflective journal on the subject. My project title is: Pedagogic Interventions for Developing Pragmatic Competence in EAL.  You can follow updates on my Research Gate account. 

•          Study Purpose: One way to help learners of English as an additional language (EAL) develop pragmatic competence is to maximally encourage internal talk by putting learners in stories they know, or giving them roles to play a given context. Pragmatic competence is the ability to communicate an intended message with all its nuances in any socio-cultural context, and to interpret the message of an interlocutor as it was intended. Cooperative attending skills is inter-topic interaction among acquaintances, whereas role plays prescribe scripted contexts in which to interact.

•          Hypothesis and Research Questions: Given the instruction students will receive throughout the course, it is assumed that they will be able to speak more meta-cognitively about pragmatic choices and options, propose alternate conversational moves, and produce more nuanced and strategic discourse.  The research question focuses on the student-teacher dance in the classroom, specifically on what the role of the instructor is in developing pragmatics. What sorts of pedagogic interventions and classroom discourse are made possible as EAL learners progress in pragmatic competence? How is this progress manifested? 

Thank you for reading and for your interest. 

Angelina 

The Ship of One's Soul at the Bitter Waters of Stolen Years

Other than the tall ships racing phenomenon hitting harbours across the world in the last forty years, and pleasure sail boats, ships rarely sail now.  Rather, they motor or propel with large engines.  Once that engine is oriented and set toward a goal, it takes a lot of energy to change her course.  Thus the ships of our souls take time to re-orient themselves, whether they wait or tack for better wind, or shift their rudders.

I have been tipping on Icarus moments as of late.  Sometimes a dream or goal is so brilliant and incredibly beautiful, that we venture too close too quickly, and take a nose dive.  Sometimes the dream is attached to something or someone that takes on the character of the dream so that the person or thing becomes indistinguishable from it.  The soul is caught, and pursues full throttle ahead without question.  As this line from Somerset Maugham laments, "Passion doesn't count the cost... It convinces you that honour is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum."

While not identical to the image depicted here, the disappointment of getting caught unawares and recognizing I am beyond my limits, conveys a similar feeling.  Caught mid-sea in doldrums, with a failed engine and the wind knocked out of my sails.  Thoughts come that I have 'missed my ship',  or have gotten embroiled on the wrong one, and have been childish and distracted, having forgotten my higher calling.  Yet, when that higher calling gets attached to selfish passions it gets rather cloudy.  Still, deep waters, bitter waters, briny with the salt of wounds opening and healing after more than a quarter of a century - years stolen by the sins of others, and my own. Entrenched, subconscious physiological and emotional fault lines of pain and grief do not release and retrain easily, even after years of careful treatment.  I don't think too clearly, when I feel so much.  It is like suffering the torments of love, bent on loving to one's hurt.  "Look not too deeply into your soul," some say.  It depends for what purpose.  Reality and identity of soul is more important than external existence and outward appearance of success.  It grounds and directs.  Oh ship of my soul, heed!  To live well in this life is not to have all your dreams now - they lie yonder the grave.  Wisdom is needed, not to shut out what is grievous or ugly within or without, but to be open-handed to the goodness of God in transforming it.  Mercy and grace surround me, and I thankfully breathe the fresh air of being alive, when I could have died.

Life could be bitter.  But I pray and cry out for it not to be.  Bitter is made sweet, and my cup runs over, because Someone Else drank the bitter sting of everlasting death for me, both now and forever.  The sweet tree revealed to Moses by prayer for the children of Israel at Mara, foreshadows the cross.  It's power is ever applicable for all time to those who submit their bitterness in exchange for the sweetness of love and forgiveness coming from the realization of a gift far more precious than what we thought we were entitled to in the first place. Treasures in heaven in exchange for bitterness and brokenness.  It is hard to comprehend, believe and live, but it is true.  This is my high calling, an opportunity to partner with the Great Restoration of God with my eyes open.  Ship of my soul rest in His healing as His will moves you, until you hear the call, "All hands on deck!"

The Fear of God

The Fear of God

Occasionally I go to a Philosopher's Cafe at SFU Harbour Centre after teaching my Friday morning class.  The most recent topic was on the Fear of God - the beginning of wisdom.   Dr. Michael Picard was the moderator, and was very good at bringing out the best in a discussion with diverse perspectives.

At first the discussion was hung up on a view of fear as in fear of punishment or fear of hell, and how potentially manipulative that was and unhealthy for human flourishing.  Then came the reductionist arguments about how religion and the concept of God are often used socially and politically by those who wish to dominate and control others.   In this view the fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom, but its death; rather, skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom (Clarence Darrow).  This can be the case when one's view of God is restricted to a single category of status versus non-status, as in an absolute monarch's rule over his subjects.  However, if one views God from the perspective of providing a governing context in which people can discover the facts, principles and laws of universal truth, then a very different kind of fear emerges. It is a mature and healthy fear of knowing that one is responsible for how one chooses to live life and transform into the person they desire to become, and graduate, as it were, from the school of life with the collected treasures of his or her soul.  Akin to this concept is the recognition of a universal moral law including existential encounters and realizations of truth, goodness, love, pain, grief, suffering and the ultimate inevitability of having to face fear and death.  These universal categories consciously or unconsciously combine to form one's metaphysical position from which one's system of right and wrong emerges.  For example, the fundamental attitude of karma towards victims of injustice is far from compassionate, since victims are viewed as getting what they deserve from a life of bad karma before being reincarnated into this one. 

Dallas Willard, a leading author in spiritual and character transformation, states in Renovation of the Heart that significant humanist and spiritual leaders of all perspectives see the necessity for personal transformation.  Where they differ is in what aspects this transformation ought to take place, and how this effectively takes place.  Willard suggests that it is a systematic process of relational honesty and growth - with  one's self, with God and with others.   This presupposes that God is personal and knowable (see James Houston's The Transforming Friendship), particularly in the aspect of His will for human life, which is based on His laws and character. The fundamental shift needed at the core of a human being is to agree with, delight in and obey God's will out of an understanding based on love.  Without this, no lasting transformation is possible, because it opens up the mind to further understanding and participation in the divine nature (II Peter 1:4).  Indeed, this is the restoration of the image of God in people, rather than people making God in their image.

The discussion at the Philosopher's Cafe barely touched on this presupposition, because I did not clearly state the analogical comparison I was making between how abstract thought in science leads to concrete application in technology, just as a theology of God guides spiritual experience and transformation. Someone commented that spirituality goes beyond science, and that is true.  However, there are some who have begun to make the topic of the subjective spiritual realm more rigorous by unveiling how objective and subjective thought work in both science and religion by examining how the mind works within a theory of mental wholeness.  Lorin Friesen's synopsis of John McDermott's Seeing God, a revivification of  Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections, is one such example, where he examines the Fear of God. 

"I suggest the most fearful thing in human existence is free will, because God seems to respect it.  Personal decisions seem to make a difference.  I am not talking about being scared about choosing the wrong kind of toothpaste.  Rather, I am talking about being scared about becoming the wrong kind of person, because it appears that I have to continue living with myself and that I will be condemned (or privileged) to interact with others who are like me."

This sense of fear is similar to that of C.S.  Lewis who wrote in The Weight of Glory that we don't simply meet and interact with mere people.  This awareness heightened for me when I saw some of the same faces around the table as at other Cafes.  One elderly gentleman, rather ragged in appearance and with quaint and incisive intelligence, struck me as needing a friend and hope, even though he carried himself with a sure and dauntless independence.  My heart cried that often the most insightful of human beings get discarded and marginalized in a culture that no longer has the will to see or to seek the cure for its inadequacies.

"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.  Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.  But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.  this does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.  We must play.  But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption."
 

Porta Coeli

Porta Coeli

Porta Coeli or "Gateway to Heaven" Convent church, or El Convento de Santo Domingo de Porta Coeli in Spanish, is located in San German, Puerto Rico, and was built by the Dominican order in 1609, making it one of the oldest church structures in the western hemisphere.  I have never been to Puerto Rico, and have never heard of this church until now, but as a celebrant of the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his historical death on a cross more than two-thousand years ago, these words were given to me as I was driving to perform in a choir concert named "Journey to the Cross" https://www.twu.ca/academics/samc/events/2014-2015-events/spring-choir-concert.html.

As a western Christian in the Reformed traditions, I have been seeking to help translate the intellectual and social problems people have with Christianity by integrating a scientific and universal understanding of truth with my worldview and personal faith journey.  In so doing, I have often been stretched to the breaking point, because of the lack of connectivity present in western culture between the empirical sciences and the realm of metaphysics, philosophy and religion. We claim tolerance and peace as a universal spirituality of oneness with the world of nature, but are intolerant of religion that presents dogmatic truth claims that can be proven and argued rationally.  It can be said that Christianity is the only falsifiable religion, because it is based on legal truth claims that can be proven or dis-proven in a court of law. From the perspective of legal apologetics, the four gospel witness accounts of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are legal documents which should not be tampered with posthumously, as is often done by groups like the Jesus Seminar
http://en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar, http://www.westarinstitute.org/projects/the-jesus-seminar.

The post-modern west is going through a fragmentation of the internal structure and cohesiveness of how things fit together, not just organically or mystically, but in fact, history and conscience.  The latter must precede the former.  A once secular journalist, Lee Strobel, found this out when he researched the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, written in his book "The Case for Christ" http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Christ-Journalists-Investigation/dp/0310339308

Because historical facts and eternal truths underlie mystical experience in the unseen realm of the mind and spirit, a cohesive worldview is possible that embraces all of human life, dying and experience as having ultimate purpose.  Universal truth is for all times places and peoples, and the gift here is this: it is both abstract in a paradigmatic sense, and concrete in a personal and relational way. If you take the abstract route of scientific investigation, you will ultimately come to see your universal theories as personifying the God of the universe.  As C.S. Lewis put it in the voice of one of his characters, Uncle Screwtape, who instructs his demon nephew Wormwood on how to distract and befuddle people, 

"Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things [This can also be a recipe for boredom and hell].  Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean the real sciences) as a defence against Chrsitianity.  They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see.  There have been sad cases among the modern physicists.  If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology, but don't let him get away from the invaluable 'real life'.  But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is the 'results of modern investigation'" (Lewis, C.S. [1942].  The Screwtape Letters. New York, N.Y.: Harper Collins, p. 4).

Conversely, if one is on the relational route of believing God loves you in Jesus Christ, you will ultimately continue in relationship with Him and come to know more of His character and righteousness.  The gift of grace precedes knowing God within His boundaries, or laws.  Only a personal knowledge of God creates meaning and purpose for the laws we do observe in nature.  Here lies the power of the cross, the universal principle of death and resurrection personified and incarnated in the perfect Son of Man and Son of God, Jesus Christ.  He comes to each person as a gift, as each recognizes their ultimate unseen end without a Saviour, dies to it, and rises in hope with Him.

Jesus Christ is the historically evident, factual, actual, proven, universal Porta Coeli, the gateway into heaven.  It is a narrow way, but the only universal way. Universality comes at great cost in the unseen, the cost of death and the cost of the life of the Son of Man who defeated death by his perfect life and death, sufficient to save all people in His death and resurrection.  In Him, we receive fresh eyes to view the suffering of the world, death, sadness and the loss of life as ultimately fading and eternally untrue (Mike Hsui, Grace Vancouver Church lead pastor, March 5, 2015). All who have this hope purify themselves (I John 3:3) among other things, from a cynical heart committed to self-preservation that recoils from hope.  The God of the universe does really touch and heal our wounds, calling us out of easy despair, self-sufficiency, boredom and lethargy to hope in God and delight in His coming kingdom, when He will make all things new.