Intercultural Teaching in the EFL Classroom : The Polish Context

The qualitative research reported in this article investigated whether and to what extent students’ intercultural competence is developed in the English language classroom at the secondary education level in Poland. In interviews teachers demonstrated their positive attitudes toward intercultural teaching and decent knowledge of the issue. However, the teachers’ narratives uncovered that they assigned the interculturality the secondary role, focusing on developing linguistic and sociolinguistic competences. The collected data revealed that students in class had very few opportunities to explore foreign cultures and compare/ contrast one culture with another. There was a lack of attention to teaching that promotes critical thinking skills among learners along with activities which foster them. However, there is insufficient evidence that teachers can currently do anything more, given the context in which they work, their constraints and lack of training and support. The findings of the current study have clear implications for curriculum designers, textbook writers and institutions in charge of teacher training - EFL syllabuses, teaching materials and teacher training should focus more on developing students’ intercultural and critical thinking skills

The Effect of Story Narrative in Multimedia Learning

abstract: ELearning, distance learning, has been a fast-developing topic in educational area. In 1999, Mayer put forward “Cognitive Theory of Multimedia learning” (Moreno, & Mayer, 1999). The theory consisted of several principles. One of the principles, Modality Principle describes that when learners are presented with spoken words, their performance are better than that with on-screen texts (Mayer, R., Dow, & Mayer, S. 2003; Moreno, & Mayer, 1999).It gave an implication that learners performance can be affected by modality of learning materials. A very common tool in education in literature and language is narrative. This way of storytelling has received success in practical use. The advantages of using narrative includes (a) inherent format advantage such as simple structure and familiar language and ideas, (b) motivating learners, (c) facilitate listening, (d) oral ability and (e)provide schema for comparison in comprehension. Although this storytelling method has been widely used in literature, language and even moral education, few studies focused it on science and technology area. The study aims to test the effect of narrative effect in multimedia setting with science topic. A script-based story was applied. The multimedia settings include a virtual human with synthetic speech, and animation on a solar cell lesson. The experiment design is a randomized alternative- treatments design, in which participants are requested to watch a video with pedagogical agent in story format or not. Participants were collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Result of transfer score and retention score showed that no significant difference between narrative and non-narrative condition. Discussion was put forward for future study.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Engineering 201

Successful learning with whiteboard animations – a question of their procedural character or narrative embedding?

Although whiteboard animations are increasingly used for educational purposes, there is little empirical evidence as to why such animations can enhance learning. To specify essential elements, their dynamic visual presentation, as well as their narrative embedding, were found to be theortically important. In a first Experiment (N = 133) with a 2 (presentation mode: static pictures vs. progressive drawing) x 2 (narrative context: with vs. without a narrative) between-subject factorial design, motivational, cognitive, affective variables, as well as learning outcomes, of secondary school students were measured. Results revealed that progressive drawing, as well as a narrative context, are mostly associated with an increase in learning-relevant variables. In a second experiment with the same sample and the same experimental design but a different whiteboard animation, results from Experiment 1 generalize to another learning content. Again, a progressive drawing, as well as a narrative context within whiteboard animation, fostered learning relevant variables as well as learning outcomes. Results are discussed considering the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, the contiguity effect as well as the instructional design theory of anchored instruction