Language Learning In Education Research Articles

Development and validation of an English language teacher learning scale

Teacher learning is of significant importance in mainstream education and a number of attempts have been made to measure the quality of teacher learning across different contexts. The available ins...

Empowering English Language Teaching-Learning Process in India

It is now well established and self evident fact that English, the fourth most widely spoken native language in the world, has become the most spoken official language in the whole world. It has become today's inevitable need to have command over this trendy language so that one can compete with their co-participants in national and International affairs successfully. Its official importance is undeniable even in those nations where it is not the primary spoken language and India being a Non-English-Speaking Country is one of them and it has its largest effect because of its second largest population in the world. English is now the language of global partnership, multi disciplinary work culture, global trade and commerce. In India, English has become one of the societal status symbol in the Indian societies as it is now gifted to determine the survival of the fittest of new generation. With the expansion of scientific approaches and technological advancements such as computers, internet, e-books and smart phone, e-learning, it has become a popular and desired trend among youth to communicate in English language. To acknowledge its worth, English language has become a very crucial part of every curriculum in the government and non government universities and schools in India. As per its global need, the roles and responsibilities of English language teachers have become very critical. The main objective of the study is to make an assessment on the suitability of current trends, perspectives and pedagogical methods used by English language trainers to improve English language among English Language Learners and to suggest them certain practical ways to improve its efficiency among beginners, intermediate and advanced level learners.

Reconceptualising Learning in Transdisciplinary Languages Education

Understanding and working with the complexity of second language learning and use in an intercultural orientation necessitates a re-examination of the different theories of learning that inform the different schools of second language acquisition (SLA). This re-examination takes place in a context where explicitly conceptualizing the nature of learning in SLA has not been sufficiently foregrounded. It also necessitates understanding how language itself, as the substance or object of learning a second language, is conceptualized. Neither the theorization of learning, nor of language on its own is sufficient to provide an adequate account of second language learning for contemporary times. In particular, this paper argues that views of language and learning derived solely from the field of (applied) linguistics are not sufficient to address the complex language learning needs of contemporary times and that a more interdisciplinary approach to language and learning is required. It is this interdisciplinary understanding that provides the basis for views of both language and learning that we consider to be necessary within an intercultural orientation. In particular, the paper will emphasize the interpretative nature of learning and the ways that such a view contributes to our understanding of learning in language education. From this perspective, the process of learning to communicate in a second language can be characterized as involving both a ‘moving between’ linguistic and cultural systems and an acknowledgement of the role of mutual interpretation in exchanging meanings through the acts of both communicating and learning.

O ENSINO DE LÍNGUA INGLESA E A IDENTIDADE DE CLASSE SOCIAL: ALGUNS APONTAMENTOS

RESUMO O ensino da língua inglesa é um importante meio de construção de identidades sociais, dentre elas, a de classe (BLOCK, 2013). Entretanto, o número reduzido de investigações a esse respeito tem deixado de chamar a atenção para sua importância. Neste artigo, buscamos discutir por que a questão da identidade de classe social deve se tornar um aspecto relevante a ser considerado e investigado no ensino-aprendizagem de línguas, em especial aqui em relação à língua inglesa. Também buscamos, por meio da Análise de Discurso Crítica (FAIRCLOUGH, 2003, VAN DIJK, 2015), apresentar um recorte de uma pesquisa que investiga de que maneira o livro didático, um instrumento de autoridade na sala de aula (TÍLIO, 2010; CORACINI, 1999), constrói identidades de classe social e quais os significados dessas identidades. Os resultados reforçam a premissa de que o ensino de inglês é, em grande medida, espaço de construção de identidades de classe, contribuindo para a manutenção de exclusões e desigualdades.

Effectiveness of Online Course in English Using Content-Based Instruction (CBI)

As educators realized that in order to successfully complete an academic task, second language (L2) learners have to master both English as a language form (grammar, vocabulary, etc.).There have been different approaches used in the reacquisition of mastery of the English language. One of which is the computer-based instruction. CBI is student-centered. One of its goals is to keep the interest and motives of the students by generating stimulating content instruction and materials, which can be done with the help of computers. The use of computer-based instruction in language learning serves as a tool in facilitating learning. It helps learners to progress at their own pace. This computer-based instruction can be programmed to be interactive and individualized. It can also be in the form of a stand-alone course to enhance or reinforce classroom learning. This kind of interactive learning using online activities to enhance language proficiency helps the teachers to achieve their goals in language learning and at the same time provide comprehensible input from discourse context. Though there are also limitations to this kind of learning but those limitations are expected to be addressed inside the classroom where the teacher is around. With this, research studies about CBI emerged evaluating its effectiveness. This is the second phase of our study, which is an online course using content-based instruction. It is a computer-assisted, interactive platform for English language learning, which targets language skills, such as reading, writing, and grammar using a variety of content-based materials from different sources like science, history, and social sciences. Lessons hosted were planned and developed for 1st-year students of BPSU to pave the way in achieving BPSU’s mission of making its academic offerings and its students globally competitive. The selection of reading texts used as part of the lesson was carefully written as well as adapted to suit the needs of the students. There were 10 lessons available hosted on the site for the students to try and for the researchers to evaluate the course. This was trialed for a month with the control and experimental group. The researchers would like to make an in-depth analysis on the effectiveness of the online courses in English using content-based instruction.

DIGITAL GAME-BASED LANGUAGE LEARNING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION

New technologies including digital game-based language learning have increasingly received attention. However, their implementation is far from expected and desired levels due to technical, instructional, financial and sociological barriers. Previous studies suggest that there is a strong need to establish courses in order to support adaptation of game-based learning pedagogy through helping teachers experience digital games themselves before they are expected to use them in teaching. This study was conducted to investigate educational digital games in foreign language teaching, to identify the determining reasons behind the pittfalls in applications and to explore the contribution of a serious game to the development of professional language skills of pre-service teachers. Pre- and post-tests were applied to measure the contribution of the game to the development of their language skills. In addition, a game diary and semi-structured interviews were used to elicit information about the problems pre-service teachers had and their perceptions on the whole process. The analysis of the data illustrated that there was great improvement in pre-service teachers’ professional language skills and attitudes towards using these games while teaching in the future. This is important in foreign language teacher education in terms of enhancing digital game-based language learning pedagogy for teachers.

Language Proficiency in an Era of Accountability

This article presents a qualitative study of integrating target language (TL) materials and activities within a world language (WL) teacher preparation program at a large, Midwestern public university. Based on document and interview data, I analyze how teacher candidates engaged with curricular materials written in the respective TL, how they interacted with their peers in the TL about those materials, and how they described the effect of both on their learning. As the analysis demonstrates, candidates reported that these experiences integrating language and language-teacher learning helped them extend their TL proficiency into pedagogical and professional domains. Moreover, they reported that this work helped them more fully understand the complexities of teaching.

In Two Maine Towns, Schools Address The Mental Health Of Refugee Children.

School-based programs in Auburn and Lewiston help meet the unique health needs of refugees from war-torn Somalia.

Novice Teachers’ Perspectives on Learning in Lesson Rehearsals in Second Language Teacher Preparation

ABSTRACTAlthough scholars working in core practices have put forth lesson rehearsals as central to novice teachers’ learning and development, there is little work on how novice teachers experience rehearsals. This qualitative research investigated learning opportunities for novice teachers of language learners during rehearsals. The analysis examines two focal novice teachers from different second language methods instructional contexts—a methods course in a TESOL licensure program and a methods course in a world language licensure program—to explore the multiple ways in which novice teachers might experience rehearsals as learning opportunities in second language teacher preparation programs. Findings indicate that the focal novice teachers experienced rehearsal as an important opportunity for externalization of core practices, which is facilitated by dialogic mediation. Implications include the need for further research regarding the nature of interaction in rehearsal and how rehearsal influences novice teachers’ subsequent enactment of practice.

A STUDY OF ANXIETY OF ENGINEERING STUDENTS TOWARDS ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Education is the powerful tool which helps to modify the behaviour of the child according to the needs and expectancy of the society. Student’s attitude is an integral part of learning and that it should, therefore become an essential component of second language learning pedagogy. Attitudes toward learning are believed to influence behaviours such as selecting and reading books, speaking in a foreign language etc. Especially in Education, if the students have positive attitude towards any subject, they can achieve many things in that specific area. There is an interaction between language learning and the environmental components in which the students were grown up. Both negative and positive attitudes have a strong impact on the success of language learning. There are many factors that might cause the students’ low proficiency in English. One might be attributed to petroleum engineering students’ motivation towards the English language. This is because learners’ motivation has been widely accepted as a key factor which influences the rate and success of second/foreign language learning and “ motivation of the students is one of the most important factors influencing their success or failure in learning the language . Another factor is learners’ attitudes. This is because an ESL/EFL learner's motivation in language learning is affected by his/her attitudes towards learning the language. Article visualizations:

Complexity in mentoring in a pre-service teacher practicum: a case study approach

Purpose– Significant effort has been made to support pre-service and novice teacher learning in the K-12 context. Less attention has been paid to promoting pre-service and novice second language teacher learning via collaboration with peers and more expert educators at the university level. In order to facilitate this type of teacher collaboration, a mentoring project was incorporated into the existing practicum of a Master of Arts in Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) program at a US University. The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of the mentoring experiences of four ESL mentor-pre-service teacher pairs in the US University context.Design/methodology/approach– For this research project, eight teachers – four mentor-pre-service teacher pairs – participated as pairs in mentoring sessions focussed on activities such as co-planning, co-teaching, and co-reflecting on teaching. Informed by a sociocultural perspective on teacher learning (Vygotsky, 1978), this study presents case studies of all four pairs in order to demonstrate the complex nature of mentoring. The data analysis focussed on the content of the teachers’ interactions and their perceptions of the mentoring experience.Findings– The study traced the developmental trajectories of the participating teachers over one 15-week academic semester. The study uncovered some critical contradictions that the participants encountered during the mentoring experience, thus pointing to its complexity. The study also uncovered the varied nature of mentoring: whereas in one pair the mentor acted as a more expert other (Vygotsky, 1978), in another pair, the mentoring relationship was more reciprocal.Practical implications– This study showed that pre-service teachers can develop further through mentoring. Such mentoring can help teachers gain confidence and share teaching strategies. At the same time, the study revealed certain challenges associated with introducing a mentoring project in a pre-service teacher practicum. It is recommended that program faculty as a whole read the rich dialogues produced by participating teachers engaged in relationships focussed on collaborative learning, thereby discovering a foundation for revisions that go beyond individual teaching practices to the programmatic level.Originality/value– This study’s principal contribution to the field is that it showcases the complex nature of mentoring experiences and the ways in which they differ from each other.

DO YOU CARE YOUR LOCAL LANGUAGE?

The blooming of the English usage every time and everywhere may exterminate the use of local languages. It is also supported by the increase of migration out of or into areas of Indonesia that makes people tend to use Indonesian often than local languages. This might be caused by the personal inability to communicate with indigenous people by their native languages. Besides, the cross cultural marriage also results on the difficulties to determine which mother tongue they introduce to their children. In fact, multicultural condition demands people to use Indonesian frequently. This condition shows that Indonesian works greatly because it is national language. In contrast, the interest of using and learning local language may decrease gradually. This study was conducted to find out whether Indonesian EFL learners of Dayakese background have highly concern to their local language. The data were gathered through direct observation, interviews, and questionnaire. The data collected, then, were analyzed rigorously using descriptive statistics. The findings show that most students have low affection towards their local language, even those who are from indigenous people. Local language is less valued than Indonesian, since they are from different ethnic. Indonesian, then, is highly valued for both formal and informal communication, whether or not it is used as language learning instruction. It is recommended that there is a need for the government to encourage the use or learning of local language. Further, the educational language policy makers together with the Art and Tourism Department consider the promoting local language as a language instruction and a subject. Thus, there will be any ways to keep the ethnicity of Indonesia.

Forms of Cooperative Learning in Language Teaching in Slovenian Language Classes at the Primary School Level

In the Slovenian language syllabus, teachers are recommended to provide a greater share of group work during class. During types of learning such as cooperative learning in smaller groups or pairs, students actively develop communicative competence. The present article presents a survey that attempted to determine whether teachers from the first to the fifth grade execute cooperative learning in language classes. The purpose of the article is to raise teachers’ awareness and encourage them to design and execute cooperative learning more frequently.

Review of Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse

Social Interaction and L2 Classroom Discourse investigates interactional practices in L2 classrooms. Using Conversation Analysis, the book unveils the processes underlying the co-construction of mutual understanding in potential interactional troubles in L2 classrooms – such as claims of insufficient knowledge (as previously described by Sert 2011) – and their resolutions. Sert defines “L2” as “an umbrella term that stands for a(n) second/foreign/additional language used in an instructed language learning setting” (p.1) – and throughout his book he uses a diverse dataset, ranging from language taster sessions over foreign language classrooms in monolingual contexts to English as an Additional Language settings in a multilingual context. This variety of settings allows him to examine a range of verbal and non-verbal features of classroom interaction, for example how code-switching is used in multilingual settings, and what the role of multimodal (such as gestures and gaze) and epistemic (for instance claims of insufficient knowledge and epistemic status checks) resources employed by students and teachers is. The book is structured in three sections: survey (Chapters 2 and 3), analysis (Chapters 4-6), and application (Chapters 7 and 8). A central focus throughout the entire book is classroom interactional competence and its influence on language learning.

The Integration of Form-focused Instruction within Communicative Language Teaching: Instructional Options

The strong versions of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) undermine the role of formal instruction in language learning and may even consider it detrimental. According to proponents of the strong CLT versions, learners pick up the language from interactions that focus on the semantic aspect of the language rather than its formal characteristics. Hence, teaching language forms is not recommended. This position has, however, faced harsh criticism over the last three decades. Compelling evidence (e.g., Millard, 2000) has showed that the sole focus on meaning may produce fluent learners who lack language accuracy. This evidence, supported by other significant hypotheses (e.g., Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis) and models (e.g., VanPatten’s Processing Model) called for the re-introduction of formal instruction, but within a CLT framework. The present paper supports this relatively recent direction. The paper provides an overview of the developments that have led to the re-introduction of formal instruction in second language (L2) learning. The paper also surveys different lines of support for the integration of the approach known as Form-Focused Instruction within Communicative Language Teaching. Finally, the paper surveys various useful pedagogical techniques to support the successful FFI-CLT marriage in the English language classroom. The techniques are categorized under Ellis’s (1998) classification of instructional intervention.

Can a kitchen teach languages? Linking theory and practice in the design of context-aware language learning environments

Smart learning environments offer rich opportunities for language learners. In particular, context-aware systems which allow learners’ progress to be sensed within and across an activity, enable instructed language learning to move beyond the traditional confines of the classroom walls. In this paper we present the European Kitchen, a real-world task-based environment for cooking and language learning. In doing so, we demonstrate how specific design decisions, in the development of this longer-term iterative design project, conjoin Human Computer Interaction practice and learning theory for situated language learning. We also show how this approach is combined with Conversation Analysis, which is used as a tool to measure the impact of these decisions on the interactions taking place in and with the kitchen. Our work reveals that in order to design for and evaluate effective and meaningful language learning, there should be more balance between technologically-driven theory and theory driven research which has a strong pedagogical foundation. Our work has implications for a transferable, interdisciplinary model of task-based, situated learning which can be applied and adapted to different skill and knowledge sets.

EFL Teachers’ Code Switching in Turkish Secondary EFL Young Language Learner Classrooms

This study investigated Turkish EFL Young Language Learner teachers’ code switching (CS hereafter) from English to Turkish in their classroom discourse. The data were collected from two different secondary private institutions in Adana and Denizli. In accordance with this aim, three EFL teachers and their intermediate level classrooms were recorded for two class hours via video camera. The recordings were transcribed and explored to see whether these teachers resorted to CS or not, if so, what types of CS they used in their classroom, what the functions of these switches were, and finally if these CS attempts contributed to their learners’ language learning or not. Face to face semi-structured interviews were held with three teachers and these interviews were analyzed through content analysis. The results obtained from video recordings and semi-structured interviews showed that all the teachers who took part in this study used CS to varying extents. Moreover, the teachers resorted to inter-sentential CS the most in terms of typology in their discourse. The detailed analyses of video recordings revealed that the teachers used CS for 20 different purposes and they employed CS mainly for translation, meta-language, asking equivalence, giving instruction and classroom management purposes. Finally, the results of interview analyses showed that the teachers found CS useful for language learning; however, they cautiously emphasized that L1 should not replace L2 in classroom. In the light of the findings of this research, some suggestions were made to EFL teachers and teacher training institutes. Keywords: EFL Young Language Learner Teachers, Classroom Interaction, Code Switching The Use of L1 in Language Learning and Teaching, EFL

Student smiles and the negotiation of epistemics in L2 classrooms

This study investigates the interactional unfolding of student smiles in instructed language learning settings drawing on data from both English as a Second Language and as a Foreign Language classrooms. Conversational actions performed by participants through ‘smiles’ is an under-researched area, especially in classroom settings where teachers’ and students’ smiles may serve different functions due to the institutional nature of ongoing interactions. To address this research gap, we aim at investigating the interactional unfolding of student smiles in English language classrooms based on 16h of video-recordings in Luxembourg and 45h of video-recordings in the US. Taking a conversation-analytic approach, we show how participants use smiles to index and resolve interactional trouble. Our analysis shows that smiles and epistemic issues in the classroom are intricately connected, and in the case of interactional trouble related to epistemic access, student smiles serve to maintain affiliation and to promote the progressivity of talk. The findings of the paper have implications for understanding the interactional unfolding of smiles in institutional interaction in general, and in classroom interaction in particular.

English Language Teaching in South Korea: A Route to Success?

This paper is an attempt to investigate the status of English language teaching (ELT) in South Korea. To do so the historical background of ELT, and the reform movement, as a measure taken by the government to boost language education in this country, have been discussed. The outcome of this measure and the philosophical underpinning of education in this country along with different issues related to language teaching, such as: learning strategies, beliefs, language ideology, and the use of technology-assisted language teaching programs have been elaborated. Attempts have been made to demystify the ELT problems in this country with the aim of alleviating the shortcomings and improving the strengths of such an educational system. Putting different pieces of the ELT puzzle in South Korea together, some of the stunting factors were recognized to be: the ideological basis of the reform movement, lack of utilizing critical pedagogy, and insufficient attempts aimed at teaching language learning strategies and technology-assisted language learning normalization. Though this paper has focused on the status of ELT in Korea, many of the raised suggestions can be utilized in other countries, in particular Asian countries with Confucian background.

Dramatic Engagement in Teaching Lao She’s Teahouse

Drama pedagogy has evolved in recent years as one the most creative and adaptable tools for engaged learning in language teaching. This paper discusses the teaching of modern Chinese play selected to be a prescribed text in pre-university Chinese literature curriculum. The play in focus is Teahouse by the renowned Chinese writer, Lao She. The study aims to pilot qualitative research through concrete individual teaching, in order to perform a preliminary classification and analysis of how teaching methods of modern plays are carried out. These include the use of the Theatre in Education and Drama in Education models to conduct the teaching of modern plays. The study purported that the use of Theatre in Education and Drama in Education are methods to trigger students’ interest in learning before lessons and to carry out warm-up activities and to evaluate lesson results. These methods also aid students to familiarize the core of the original texts and use meaningful, theatrical real scenarios for the teaching of language and literature. Keywords - Education, drama pedagogy, classroom pedagogy, qualitative design, Singapore