Dr. Aria Razfar is Professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture and affiliate with Linguistics and Medical Education at the University of Illinois Chicago. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. Dr. Razfar has established himself as one of the leading scholars in the fields of applied linguistics, education, and learning sciences.
The U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation have provided major funding for his research on language learning, mathematics, and science. In 2014, Dr. Razfar was recognized for his scholarship by being named the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Researcher of the Year for the Social Sciences.
Dr. Razfar has authored theoretically driven empirical studies and conceptual pieces that draw on qualitative and quantitative methods, sociocultural theories of learning, and the application of language ideologies in urban schools. His publications have appeared in premiere academic journals such as Anthropology of Education Quarterly, Human Development, Linguistics and Education, Mind, Culture, and Activity, and TESOL Quarterly. Dr. Razfar is also lead author of Applying Linguistics in the Classroom: A Sociocultural Perspective (2014) and Action Research in STEM and English Language Learning: An Integrated Approach for Developing Teacher Researchers (2022) (Routledge Press).
Session Description
NARATE (Narrative Analysis of Repair and Teacher English Learner Expertise) is a research project that examines corrective feedback and repair practices in classroom environments with multilingual learners. Drawing on sociocultural theories of learning, narrative analysis, and language ideologies (Razfar 2012), this comparative study aims to critically examine how language ideologies mediate corrective practices of teachers by examining their personal and in-class narratives of being corrected and/or correcting learners. Our data corpus consists of two groups of teachers. The first is a cohort of teachers who participated in university based professional development program for more than 2 years with an explicit orientation towards sociocultural principles of language and learning as well as an explicit focus on developing critical language awareness and/or ideologies. They worked as a cohort and conducted action research in their own classrooms. The second group (control) did not have such a professional development experience. In a mixed method format, narratives were analyzed to synthesize how educators make in the moment decisions about corrective feedback and repairs. Emergent findings demonstrate that control group educators have little to no awareness of how language ideologies mediate learning, classroom activities, and instruction; whereas teachers from the professional development program have a more clear understanding between language ideologies and their pedagogical practice. Furthermore, teachers relied on their past, personal educational experiences as how to mediate corrective feedback and repair within their classroom. In addition, they tended to focus on narrow and reductive conceptions of language, literacy, and learning. In contrast, teachers who participated in the university school partnership made clear connections to research and displayed more egalitarian and expansive language ideologies when it came to how to support multilingual learners in the classroom.