The effects of virtual exchanges on oral skills and motivation

The present study aims to assess the benefits of participating in a virtual language exchange (VE) for practicing oral skills with native speakers by measuring learners’ motivation to learn the language, communicate, and collaborate. The oral language development of advanced learners of English at a Spanish university was compared with a control group from the same class who did not participate in the VE. This study’s motivation was two-fold: 1) pilot testing the VE project before making it mainstream and offering it as an integral part of this university’s language courses, and 2) testing whether that increased advanced learners’ purpose and motivation to communicate with others in the target language. Data were gathered from learners’ oral grades and two questionnaires to report on the participants’ experiences and examine the VEs’ potential to support the development of oral skills. Quantitative analyses of learners’ oral grades and questionnaires revealed that the VE contributed to boosting their oral skills, increased their motivation to learn the foreign language, and added a sense of purpose to collaborate with other learners while carrying out communicative tasks. Findings also suggest that improvement in oral skills was more noticeable among lower-proficiency learners taking part in the VE

The Global People toolbook: managing the life cycle of intercultural partnerships

This Toolbook has been designed for those who are planning and running international projects and who feel a need for guidance. It has its origins in a major educational project, the eChina-UK Programme, that created new collaborations between UK and Chinese Higher Education Institutions around the development of e-learning materials. The rich intercultural learning that emerged from that programme prompted the development of a new and evidence-based set of resources for other individuals and institutions undertaking international collaborative projects. Although the main focus of the work is on intercultural effectiveness in international contexts, we believe that many of the resources have a more general value and are useful for those planning collaboration in any situation of diversity – national, regional, sectoral or institutional

Student-Centered, Interaction-Based, Community-Driven Language Teaching

This portfolio is a compilation that highlights some of the author’s accomplished work while in the Master of Second Language Teaching (MSLT) program at Utah State University (USU). Organized into sections that reflect the author’s teaching and research perspectives as a MSLT graduate student and instructor, who taught intensive English reading, writing, and conversation courses for the Intensive English Language Institute (IELI). In the first section, teaching perspectives, the author describes her desired professional environment, shares her personal teaching philosophy statement, and accounts for her professional development through classroom observations. In the second section, research perspectives, two research papers and an annotated bibliography demonstrate the author’s interests, especially in regard to the teaching of English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms

Mobile collaborative language learning: State of the art

This paper presents a review of mobile collaborative language learning studies published in 2012–16 with the aim to improve understanding of how mobile technologies have been used to support collaborative learning among second and foreign language students. We identify affordances, general pedagogical approaches, second- and foreign-language pedagogical approaches, second language acquisition (SLA) principles and affective designs. The results indicate that affordances such as flexible use, continuity of use, timely feedback, personalisation, socialisation, self-evaluation, active participation, peer coaching, sources of inspiration outdoors and cultural authenticity have been emphasised. These affordances were found to be particularly suited to promote social constructivism, which is often sustained by game-based, task based and seamless learning. In terms of second and foreign language pedagogical approaches, the combination of individualised and collaborative learning prevails, along with task based, situated and communicative language learning, and raising orthographic awareness. Among SLA principles, negotiation of meaning and opportunities for feedback are highlighted. Affective aspects include increases in motivation, engagement and enjoyment, mutual encouragement, reduction in nervousness and embarrassment, and a few negative reports of risk of distraction, safety concerns, feelings of uncertainty and technical problems. The reviewed studies present a convincing case for the benefits of collaboration in mobile language learning

Development of English as a Second Language in the Context of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games

This dissertation examined the affordances of commercially developed massively multiplayer online (role-playing) games (MMOGs) for second language (L2) development. It comprises three self-contained but related studies. The first study, as a scoping review, synthesized 32 empirical papers, which investigated different aspects of L2 development in the context of these games. It sought to find out what aspects of L2 learning have been examined and how, and what the findings suggest regarding L2 learning opportunities and outcomes. This study highlighted that empirical research in this area is mainly qualitative and that L2-related affective factors, vocabulary, and communicative competence have been the most widely investigated topics. It concluded that MMOGs afford socially supportive and emotionally safe environments, which encourage L2 learners to use multiple opportunities for enriching their L2 vocabulary and enhancing their communicative competence in the target language. The second study was an exploratory research. It adopted an interactionist approach to characterize the nature of the negotiations of meaning that occurred in the conversational exchanges between native (NES) and non-native English speakers (NNESs) playing World of Warcraft. The data consisted of 63 hours of audio-recorded, in-game conversations over a 5-month period. The participants consisted of an NES and 6 NNESs who were divided into two groups (low and high intermediate) according to their English language proficiency. This study identified and characterized the most frequently occurred triggers, indicators, responses and reaction to the responses in three types of dyadic conversational exchanges. The third study examined L2 development through ―usage-based‖ theories of language learning. It was a time-series (longitudinal) research that examined the trend of changes in the linguistic complexity of the NNESs‘ spoken discourse during a 5-month period of gameplay. This examination involved repeated (in three equally-distributed time intervals) calculations of fourteen syntactic complexity indices and the indices associated with three components of lexical complexity (diversity, sophistication, and density). Overall, the results turned out to be more promising for the low intermediate than the high intermediate group of the NNESs. More detailed findings are presented and discussed in light of the current literature

Negotiations for meaning in the context of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game

This study investigated negotiations for meaning as conditions for second language (L2) learning in the context of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft (WoW) (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004). Varonis and Gass’s (1985) and Smith’s (2003a) models were used to identify negotiation episodes during on-task and off-task talks among the participants while playing WoW. The participants were six non-native (NNS) and one native English speaker (NS). The NNSs were divided into two teams of three: Team 1 (T1) pre-intermediate and Team 2 (T2) upper-intermediate. The NS played the game with both teams. The study lasted for six months and resulted in 59.96 hours of recorded audio and nine hours of screen-recorded gaming sessions. Negotiation patterns were compared across the L2 proficiency levels and three different types of dyads. The results revealed that (a) T1 encountered more communication breakdowns, but T2 engaged in more negotiations, (b) T1 engaged in more complex negotiations, (c) breakdowns and negotiations occurred more during off-task talk, and (d) breakdowns were triggered more by the NS’s utterances in T1 and by NNSs’ utterances in T2. The results also showed the participants’ abundant L2 use to undertake authentically contextualized game-driven tasks, meticulous involvement in bi- and multi-lateral negotiations, and creative strategies to resolve incomprehension

Development of English as a Second Language in the Context of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games

This dissertation examined the affordances of commercially developed massively multiplayer online (role-playing) games (MMOGs) for second language (L2) development. It comprises three self-contained but related studies. The first study, as a scoping review, synthesized 32 empirical papers, which investigated different aspects of L2 development in the context of these games. It sought to find out what aspects of L2 learning have been examined and how, and what the findings suggest regarding L2 learning opportunities and outcomes. This study highlighted that empirical research in this area is mainly qualitative and that L2-related affective factors, vocabulary, and communicative competence have been the most widely investigated topics. It concluded that MMOGs afford socially supportive and emotionally safe environments, which encourage L2 learners to use multiple opportunities for enriching their L2 vocabulary and enhancing their communicative competence in the target language. The second study was an exploratory research. It adopted an interactionist approach to characterize the nature of the negotiations of meaning that occurred in the conversational exchanges between native (NES) and non-native English speakers (NNESs) playing World of Warcraft. The data consisted of 63 hours of audio-recorded, in-game conversations over a 5-month period. The participants consisted of an NES and 6 NNESs who were divided into two groups (low and high intermediate) according to their English language proficiency. This study identified and characterized the most frequently occurred triggers, indicators, responses and reaction to the responses in three types of dyadic conversational exchanges. The third study examined L2 development through ―usage-based‖ theories of language learning. It was a time-series (longitudinal) research that examined the trend of changes in the linguistic complexity of the NNESs‘ spoken discourse during a 5-month period of gameplay. This examination involved repeated (in three equally-distributed time intervals) calculations of fourteen syntactic complexity indices and the indices associated with three components of lexical complexity (diversity, sophistication, and density). Overall, the results turned out to be more promising for the low intermediate than the high intermediate group of the NNESs. More detailed findings are presented and discussed in light of the current literature

The Global People competency framework: competencies for effective intercultural interaction

This Competency Framework explains the competencies that are needed for effective intercultural interaction. In contrast to the Life Cycle Model for Intercultural Partnerships (see the Global People Toolbook) which presents the competencies by stage (i.e. key competencies are identified for each stage of a project life cycle), the Competency Framework presents them by clusters. Intercultural competencies can be grouped into four interrelated clusters, according to the aspect of competence they affect or relate to: - Knowledge and ideas - Communication - Relationships - Personal qualities and dispositions We overview these four clusters in Section 2. In Sections 3 – 6, for each competency cluster, we list the key component competencies, along with descriptive explanations of each of them. We also provide case study examples from the eChina-UK Programme to illustrate one or more of the following: - How the competency manifests itself; - Why the competency is important or is needed; - How the competency can be displayed in behaviour; - What problems may occur when the competency is not present. The Competency Framework is thus useful for those who wish to gain a systematic, in-depth understanding of intercultural effectiveness and the competencies need to achieve it

English as an Academic Lingua Franca in Spanish Tertiary Education: An Analysis of the use of Pragmatic Strategies in English-Medium LectureS.

Durante la última década, un cambio lingüístico ha sido especialmente notable en los contextos de educación superior debido al creciente uso del inglés como medio de instrucción (EMI) en las universidades europeas. Por ello, existe una innegable necesidad de saber más sobre las prácticas diarias de quienes participan en actividades académicas internacionales usando el inglés como vehículo de comunicación. Numerosos estudios se han realizado previamente en relación al inglés utilizado como lengua franca (ELF) en el ámbito académico. Sin embargo, existe una relativa falta de estudios empíricos sobre este uso del inglés en las universidades españolas en comparación con estudios similares en instituciones académicas europeas (Mauranen, 2006b; Björkman, 2010, 2011b, 2013). Esta investigación pretende estudiar las prácticas de inglés como medio de instrucción en diferentes disciplinas en la Universidad de Zaragoza (España), centrándose en el tipo de estrategias pragmáticas que utilizan los participantes para facilitar la comprensión. Estas prácticas lingüísticas son analizadas en este estudio con el fin de arrojar luz sobre el impacto que tiene el inglés en la eficacia comunicativa en estos entornos de enseñanza-aprendizaje.Los resultados derivan del análisis de un corpus de 12 clases magistrales impartidas en inglés como medio de instrucción que fueron grabadas en dos titulaciones diferentes. Estas se complementan con entrevistas semiestructuradas con los profesores y un pequeño corpus de diapositivas de presentaciones en formato PowerPoint que los mismos profesores utilizaron para impartir sus clases. Para analizar estos tres conjuntos de datos se ha utilizado un enfoque discursivo-pragmático y una metodología de orientación etnográfica. Por lo tanto, en este estudio se utiliza la triangulación de datos y la triangulación metodológica, ambas derivando en resultados tanto cuantitativos como cualitativos. Los resultados del estudio muestran 13 estrategias pragmáticas diferentes utilizadas en las sesiones magistrales grabadas para cumplir funciones comunicativas tales como potenciar la explicitud, aclarar y negociar el significado y/o el uso aceptable del lenguaje. El análisis de datos revela que las estrategias pragmáticas observadas en el corpus se utilizan principalmente para evitar posibles problemas comunicativos, pero también para remediar problemas de producción que obstaculizan abiertamente la comunicación y para co-construir la comprensión. Respaldando los estudios existentes sobre el inglés utilizado como lengua vehicular para la instrucción, los resultados revelan un uso altamente contextual y situacional de estrategias pragmáticas.<br /