Developing Adults\u27 Oral English Communicative Competence in an EFL Environment: Collaborative Studies of a Chinese EFL Teacher and Her Students

Economic and educational globalization presents Chinese college students with career and academic incentives to develop their oral English communicative competence; however, at the secondary level, students study English mainly for the purpose of written tests. As a result, their oral English learning is largely overlooked. In addition, significant challenges exist for learning oral English at the college level: large-sized classes, an English-as-a-foreign-language-learning (EFL) environment, traditional rote learning, student diversity, and different English-learning histories. This research aims at investigating effective teaching pedagogy suitable for large-sized college classes of students developing oral communicative competence in an EFL environment. With Vygotsky sociocultural theory as a foundation, I apply practitioner action research to conduct two phases of study. The action applies a collaborative, communication-oriented pedagogy in a large-sized oral English class. In phase one of the study, students\u27 group or pair work on communicative activities promotes and facilitates their social interactions in an EFL environment that enhance comprehensible input and output. In phase two of the study, continual practicing of communicative activities in groups or pairs facilitates their oral English grammatical knowledge, speaking strategies and sociocultural discourse rules through meaning negotiation and EFL teacher and or learners\u27 collaboration and assistance. Also, practicing communicative activities actively engages students in their own learning process and offers a new role for the EFL teacher: introducing language social rules, directing students to resources, encouraging peer-to-peer assistance, and focusing on feedback that enhances strategic competence. Therefore, I suggest that for developing students\u27 oral English communicative competence in an EFL environment with large-sized classes, consistent group or pair work using diverse communicative activities should be applied.\u2

Volume 2 of The Nebraska Educator: Full Issue

« Ce n’est que ridicule d’être sourd, c’est triste d’être aveugle. On peut ainsi mesurer la différence qu’il y a entre la nature visible et les hommes qui parlent. »Jules Renard, Journal, 1898. L’existence d’êtres humains apparemment dépourvus de langage a, de tout temps, suscité la curiosité, la fascination voire l’inquiétude. C’est qu’ils représentent dans l’imaginaire collectif, l’homme dans sa plus simple expression, livré à lui-même, dans le dénuement le plus total, privé de toute relati..

Framework for collaborative knowledge management in organizations

Nowadays organizations have been pushed to speed up the rate of industrial transformation to high value products and services. The capability to agilely respond to new market demands became a strategic pillar for innovation, and knowledge management could support organizations to achieve that goal. However, current knowledge management approaches tend to be over complex or too academic, with interfaces difficult to manage, even more if cooperative handling is required. Nevertheless, in an ideal framework, both tacit and explicit knowledge management should be addressed to achieve knowledge handling with precise and semantically meaningful definitions. Moreover, with the increase of Internet usage, the amount of available information explodes. It leads to the observed progress in the creation of mechanisms to retrieve useful knowledge from the huge existent amount of information sources. However, a same knowledge representation of a thing could mean differently to different people and applications. Contributing towards this direction, this thesis proposes a framework capable of gathering the knowledge held by domain experts and domain sources through a knowledge management system and transform it into explicit ontologies. This enables to build tools with advanced reasoning capacities with the aim to support enterprises decision-making processes. The author also intends to address the problem of knowledge transference within an among organizations. This will be done through a module (part of the proposed framework) for domain’s lexicon establishment which purpose is to represent and unify the understanding of the domain’s used semantic