News and Events
Features
Fenner Undergraduate Research Award Recipient
Thanks in part to a Fenner Undergraduate Research Award this spring, Clayton Caroon, a senior English major at Ohio State-Newark, will be returning to Vietnam to continue his research on culturally appropriate English-language pedagogical methods. Caroon will conduct research on-site in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to study contemporary educational methods and ideologies applied within its public schools, universities, and private English language institutes and academies.
The $500 Fenner grant is just one of several awards Clay has won for this project. The Ohio State-Newark campus has twice supported his work with $1000 Undergraduate Student Research Grants—the first time for an exploratory trip to the region in 2006, and again this spring in support of his upcoming return stay in Vietnam, where he will use his contacts, including teachers in the public education system and professors at the National University of Vietnam and the private language institution ILA, to conduct ethnographic classroom research.
"Clay is on fire," said Dr. Elizabeth Weiser, Caroon's faculty advisor for the Fenner award. "His research interests cross a great many academic boundaries, and he has managed to attract the attention of scholars from around the university."
During his 2006 Ohio State-Newark-funded research trip, Clay learned that the English language study offered in Vietnam applied imported English language teaching materials developed in England, Australia, Canada, and America. "However," he noted, "many of the language educators I met with said that differences between Vietnamese and 'Western' educational ideologies were a barrier to their students' language acquisition. I believe we can work together to begin to develop a means for greater ideological synergy between East and West. Ultimately, I want to help design better, more appropriate ways of teaching English that combine knowledge from the host countries with Western techniques and ideologies."
Clay readily admits that this is a long-term goal. "This field study is just the beginning of what I hope to do with this project," he said. Although he will be presenting specifically on Vietnamese pedagogy at the Denman Student Research Forum, another aspect of his work, which he presented at the Newark Forum, involves connections between Writing Center and English as a Second Language methodologies for improving writing. A peer writing consultant in the Newark campus's Writing Lab, Clay recently won the East Central Writing Centers Association's Outstanding Leader of the Year Award.
"From my perspective," Weiser noted, "Clay's research is far-reaching. He pushes forward the discussions in rhetoric and composition of what constitutes 'good' communication beyond the Western canon. He not only theorizes the intersection of language acquisition and deep-rooted cultural ideologies, but he also does so in Vietnam, a country overlooked by scholars that has a burgeoning ELT infrastructure and has sent large numbers of English-language learners to the United States. As he continues the work he'll begin with these awards, he really has the potential to someday impact the whole global phenomenon of English-language instruction."
