This article examines the way in which e‐learning is transforming the nature of social interaction in higher education. In this new educational environment, radical societal transitions and the opportunities afforded by modern communication technologies together produce formidable challenges. Significant as these challenges may be, concentration upon problems of a practical kind draws attention away from the more theoretical concerns in understanding e‐learning. By drawing together developments in social, educational and communicational theory and Gilly Salmon’s hands‐on approach to teaching and learning online, this article reveals some unintended consequences: e‐moderation and the use of e‐tivities may perpetuate the very conditions that limit our chances of dealing successfully with the challenges posed by e‐learning. While theory may muddle what might otherwise be communicated meaningfully to those in search of practical answers, theoretical developments provide concepts and frameworks that can be placed in the service of a critical understanding of e‐learning and the transformation of social interaction in higher education
Since some of my students are new to using technology in their teaching and learning, this element of compulsion would need to be scaffolded. For future course redesign, at the beginning of the course I could set a task for the students, as practising teachers, to investigate how forums can be used in their teaching and how they promote learning.
Within the field of second language teacher education (SLTE), narrative has largely functioned as a vehicle for teacher inquiry, based on the assumption that such inquiry will ultimately bring about productive change in teachers and their teaching practices. Less attention has been paid to documenting what this change looks like or how engagement in narrative activities fosters teacher professional development. From a Vygotskian socioculturai theoretical perspective, we argue that the transformative power of narrative lies in its ability to ignite cognitive processes that can foster teacher professional development. We tease out the complex ways in which narrative functions as a mediational tool—narrative as externalization, verbalization, and systematic examination—in fostering teacher professional development, and we highlight the interplay between these functions by tracing teacher professional development in two teacher-authored narrative inquiries. We then turn to the centrality of narrative as a vehicle for teacher inquiry in transforming the field of SLTE itself. Specifically, we highlight various outlets, in both center and periphery contexts, where the products of teachers' narrative activities are functioning as a tool for knowledge-building and professional development practices that are working in consort to transform the professional landscape that constitutes the field of SLTE.
Although the overall mission of second language (L2) teacher education has remained relatively constant, that is, to prepare L2 teachers to do the work of this profession, the field's understanding of that work—of who teaches English, who learns English and why, of the sociopolitical and socioeconomic contexts in which English is taught, and of the varieties of English that are being taught and used around the world—has changed dramatically over the past 40 years. This article examines the epistemological underpinnings of a more general sociocultural turn in the human sciences and the impact that this turn has had on the field's understanding of how L2 teachers learn to do their work. Four interrelated challenges that have come to the forefront as a result of this turn are discussed: (a) theory/practice versus praxis, (b) the legitimacy of teachers' ways of knowing, (c) redrawing the boundaries of professional development, and (d) "located" L2 teacher education. In addressing these challenges, the intellectual tools of inquiry are positioned as critical if L2 teacher education is to sustain a teaching force of transformative intellectuals who can navigate their professional worlds in ways that enable them to create educationally sound, contextually appropriate, and socially equitable learning opportunities for the students they teach.
It aims to describe how the course wiki was used to teach writing for academic and professional purposes, and to analyse what impact using the wiki had on the writer–reader relationship. The case study employed several research techniques, including participant observation, text analysis and a self-report questionnaire. The texts published by students on the wiki were examined for reader-oriented features and interactional metadiscourse resources. The results indicate that using the wiki for writing activities made students pay close attention to grammatical correctness and structural coherence.
Over a period of two months, as an integral part of their ESL homework, groups of students designed and put together, through a series of successive drafts, a description of their secondary school which they had joined from primary school a few months previously.
A research study which used the tools of functional linguistics to illuminate the writing requirements of the history curriculum in the context of Australian secondary schools. It shows how the resulting linguistic description was integrated into a sequence of teaching and learning activities through collaboration between linguist specialists and content/pedagogic specialists. These activities were designed to facilitate students’ writing skills whilst simultaneously developing their historical knowledge.
The authors suggest that a necessary tension exists between authoritative and dialogic approaches as dialogic exchanges are followed by authoritative interventions (to develop the canonical scientific view), and the authoritative introduction of new ideas is followed by the opportunity for dialogic application and exploration of those ideas
This paper describes a methodology for the analysis of classroom talk, called socio-cultural discourse analysis, which focuses on the use of language as a social mode of thinking – a tool for teaching-and-learning, constructing knowledge, creating joint understanding and tackling problems collaboratively. Its application involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods and enables the study of both educational processes and learning outcomes
This work illustrates how a meaningful metalanguage can support
L2 learners in accomplishing challenging tasks in the primary school curriculum at the same time that it promotes the kind of focused consciousness-raising and explicit talk about language that has been shown to facilitate L2 development.
The purpose of this research was to explore trainer questioning strategies which aimed to scaffold development and learning in teacher training feedback sessions. Research was conducted with a group of Turkish pre-service English teacher trainees at an English-medium university in Turkey. Findings include a categorisation of different question types which seemed to prompt reflection and construction of knowledge. The data also suggest that trainees need varying levels of support through different question types to better scaffold their understanding of teaching.
The paper questions why practice seems resistant to change, despite the promotion of social constructivist approaches to learning in university. Research has suggested that at the heart of the matter are the ‘inflexible’ values and beliefs that primary postgraduate trainees bring to initial teacher training programmes and a tendency to default to observed practice.
There is a tendency to argue for or against bilingual education in terms of productivity (student attainment expressed as test scores), and that productivity is discussed in terms of division of time, curriculum and speakers. Although this orientation has produced some valuable macro- level accounts, it does not address the need for close-up interaction data showing how language(s) are used by teachers and students in classroom activities.
Bilingual education, in its many manifestations, can be used to
serve a number of educational and social goals which include:
• promotion of a majority language in a linguistically diverse society;
• promotion of a minority language in a linguistically diverse society;
• promotion of both majority and minority languages in a linguistically diverse society; • revitalization of a local minority language in a linguistically diverse society;
• promotion of foreign language in a foreign language learning context.
Leung focusses on two less commonly discussed areas: (a) the ways in which the notion of language as medium of instruction is abstracted in scholarly discussions and research; and (b) pedagogic integration of curriculum learning and language learning, foregrounding the need to attend explicitly to issues of language learning, particularly second language/additional language learning in bilingual education.
Language learning, especially second/additional language learning, is not an automatic and universal process for all learners p.11
Examination of how the chosen medium of instruction has been used and exploited in teaching materials and classroom processes would open up new angles of research. Combining these two aspects of language use is likely to enrich the classroom research agenda within bilingual education. p. 12