Graduate Researcher Series: an interview with Michael Sadeghi

Felicia Lee

Michael is a first-year PhD student at the School of Languages and Linguistics. He had several publications in the field of English as a Second Language (ESL) under his belt. His research interests lie in task-based and task-supported language teaching, working memory, and classroom discourse.

Felicia spoke to Michael about his PhD research and his concurrent research projects, and his experience publishing in several high-impact academic journals.

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So Michael, perhaps you could start us off by telling us about your PhD project, and why it is a significant area of study.

Based on my experience as an English teacher and a researcher in the areas of task-based and task-supported language teaching, I have always observed that tasks would be given to students to measure different constructs like oral production, vocabulary acquisition, learning processes, just to name a few. However, the tasks are often multimedia in nature, especially in today’s technologically advanced learning environment. So these tasks often include videos, audio narrations, pictures or texts, and when they are presented to the students, they would be required to produce an oral or written piece of work. For my PhD project, I am interested to explore how limitations in learners’ cognitive resources, for instance, their working memory, can affect their task production, or output once they are provided with different types of multimedia tasks.

I’d say that it’s an important area of study because nowhere in current literature considers multimedia input or tasks as a variable influencing output or production. Of course, there have been studies looking at the effect of multimedia inputs on language acquisition and perception comprehension. There are gaps to fill in terms of the correlation between the nature of multimedia input and output, and how cognitive resources may play a role in the input-output conversion.

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That sounds like a really exciting project! Besides your PhD project, you are also involved in two other projects on the side. Could you tell us more about them?

One of the projects is an action research project done in the context of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and it’s a joint project with a co-author that I have been working with since I was a master’s student at the University of Tehran. I’m the sole researcher for the other project.

So for the action research project, my co-author and I are interested in the reflective practices of teachers to hone their pedagogical strategies in the EAP classroom. We are looking at 10 teachers with five of them completing their reflections of their teaching strategies individually, and the other five completing their reflections dialogically and collaboratively in a group. In the latter group, the teachers would view video recordings of their classroom teaching processes before they reflect upon their lessons. The purpose of the study is to compare the two methods of reflective practices and if there are significant differences between the two methods in terms of teaching and learning outcomes.

The other project I’m working on is on task-supported language teaching. Basically, I’m interested in finding out if providing explicit instructions before task performance affects learners’ language-related episodes once they work in dyads before their oral production. I might also look at the mediating effects of working memory.

It looks like you’re a busy bee. Are you also occupied with other activities apart from your research work?

Yes, I’m teaching English at various language institutes in Melbourne a couple of days a week, and I’m also currently employed as a casual Research Assistant with the Business School at Deakin University. I’m working on three projects right now, and I’m happy to be able to utilise my knowledge in education in the business school context.

I hope you have some time to rest and relax. I also found out that you’re no stranger to publishing in high-impact academic journals such as Language Teaching Research and ELT Journal, and you have several publications under your belt. How did you dip your toe into the world of academic publishing?

I was doing a project with one of my professors in my department at the University of Tehran. I collected all the data and analysed them, but when it was time to write the manuscript, he backed out. The reason behind his decision to back out was that my supervisor was his friend, and apparently, when I have a supervisor, I’m supposed to only work with only them. So, if I work with his friend without getting him involved, that’s a huge faux-pas in the academic world back home. I just wonder why the professor I was working with didn’t tell me this when I first went to him and asked him to work with me on that project!

I was disappointed with the turn of events, but I told myself that I would finish the project on my own since I had the data and everything else. The problem was that I was only in the second semester of my master’s course and I didn’t know ANYTHING about research and writing academic papers. I decided to contact a former student of one of my BA professors, Mostafa, who knew the ins and outs of academia research and publishing. After a long and fruitful conversation, Mostafa suggested that I forget about my project and help him conduct another one which I accepted. Mostafa basically taught me everything I need to know about manuscript writing and publishing, and I’m extremely thankful for his help. That was when we started to work together, and all our projects are done collaboratively ever since.

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And now you have four published journals. Do you have any words of advice for graduate researchers with the aspiration to publish?

Read a lot — that’s my golden advice. I can’t reiterate this enough but read extensively and intensively. That’s very important.

Also, if you have someone whom you can connect with and speak to, just to spark off some ideas or even provide constructive feedback for whatever you’re doing, that’ll be good. Sometimes you need someone who’s not in your field to discuss ideas with and provide a fresh perspective on things.

Finally, persistence is the key. If I hadn’t been persistent enough to reach out to Mostafa after my professor declined to publish our work, I wouldn’t have done it alone. When Mostafa helped me with the manuscript and I was told to write a section, I remember I had to rewrite the section for about 20 times. In fact, my determination was why he decided to work with me.

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It looks like your hard work has definitely paid off. It was a pleasure speaking to you, Michael, and I’ve learnt so much from your experiences. All the best in your academic journey! Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Felicia.