An exploration of intended, enacted, and experienced TCSL e-learning curriculum in a Taiwan Master’s program

This dissertation presents a case study focusing on the role of e-learning in a Master’s degree program for teaching Chinese as a second language (TCSL) in an institute in a university in Taiwan. This study aimed to explore in depth the relationship between e-learning education and TCSL curricula in Taiwan. An understanding of this relationship was first sought by exploring the existing literature and clarifying the meanings of e-learning more generally, investigating conceptual frameworks of curriculum, and then researching the developing role of e-learning firstly in CALL (computer-assisted language learning), and secondly in TCSL teacher preparation programs. This led to the conclusion that a systematic review of the situation in TCSL training in Taiwan was called for. This research then sought to address the issue by conducting an in depth inquiry into the major stakeholders’ perceptions of the role of e-learning in TCSL in terms of their intended, enacted and experienced curricula within a TCSL Master’s program in Taiwan. The research design involved a qualitative case study, framed by an interpretivist theoretical perspective and grounded in a constructionist epistemology. The primary research question was “How did the major stakeholders in the case study conceive of the role of e-learning education in a TCSL Master’s program in Taiwan?” Qualitative data collection methods and data analysis techniques were chosen to facilitate an extensive understanding of e-learning in relation to the TCSL Master’s program. The findings suggest that perspectives and experiences varied among the participants generally in expected ways but with some surprises. Overall, it was found that, within this Master’s program, e-learning was not a valued component. Three main areas of discussion arose from the findings. First, the factors that contributed to negative influences on participants’ perspectives about the importance of students’ e-learning development in their intended curricula. These were participants’ perceptions of e-learning in TCSL, their prior e-learning experiences in TCSL practice, and their perspectives on the relationship between TCSL teachers’ e-learning competence and job opportunities. Second, when Mishra and Koehler’s (2006) TPACK framework was used to evaluate participants’ curricula in relation to the formal courses of the Master’s program, none of the technology-related types of knowledge was found to be adequately catered for in the program. Third, participants had limited experience in relation to TCSL synchronous online distance learning despite an increasing demand for online TCSL teachers worldwide due to the radical development of ICT in the field of L2 education. The research suggests a neglect of a significant role for e-learning in TCSL professional education, both in terms of applying up-to-date theories for L2 learning and in terms of preparing teachers for the explosive growth in international demand for CSL on-line teaching and learning. It adds to this research by providing insights into the perspectives underlying current practice by the three major sets of stakeholders in TCSL education, by drawing out the implications of the findings in terms of theoretical as well as practical perspectives, and by providing helpful recommendations for future research

Recognition of Characters from Streaming Videos

Non

Dancing with Chains: A Case Study of Native Mandarin Chinese Teachers and Pedagogy in U.S. Higher Education

This qualitative case study explored how native Mandarin Chinese teachers experienced and adapted to the linguistic, cultural, and pedagogical differences in teaching Mandarin Chinese to English-speaking students at four-year higher education institutions in the United States. Drawing upon the interviews of 11 participant teachers, the researcher applied theoretical frameworks of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK), pedagogical reasoning and action (PRA), and Confucianism to interpret the findings. Findings from the research revealed that Chinese instructors prepared themselves first as students and adopted effective modes of teaching to teach Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language in U.S. higher education. Findings from the data showed that Chinese instructors faced and coped with four challenges in teaching college level Mandarin Chinese to American students. The challenges included: (1) professional insecurity, (2) understanding and meeting student needs, (3) teaching Chinese language skills, and (4) engaging and motivating students. The corresponding coping strategies adopted by Chinese instructors included: (1) acting at an individual level to maintain and increase intellectual vitality of Chinese instructors, (2) optimizing class time, creating opportunities for students to practice and use Chinese in and outside class, and tailoring teaching content and approaches to the diversified situations and needs of students, (3) employing communicative approach and student-centered, task-based pedagogies to teach language skills, and (4) making teaching content and approaches flexible, relevant to student life, and able to optimize student creativity, and utilizing technologies and jokes to engage students; creating opportunities for students to realize learning Chinese was useful and interesting to motivate students. Findings from my analysis demonstrated that to become effective Chinese instructors in U.S. higher education, native Mandarin Chinese teachers accumulated and integrated knowledge of Chinese language (and culture), pedagogies, and technologies to engage students in a cycle of comprehension, transformation, instruction, evaluation, and reflection and new comprehension. The research findings also support Confucian emphasis on adjusting teaching approaches according to student aptitudes and characteristics. Based on the findings, my recommendations focused on strategies Mandarin Chinese teachers and university administrators could adopt to ensure and enhance effective teaching and learning of Mandarin Chinese in U.S. higher education

Engaging Stage1 students in Western Sydney Mandarin classes through pictographic characters : a unit of work for Stage 1 children

This thesis reports a case study conducted in the Western Sydney region, where the teacher-researcher teaches Mandarin in a Stage 1 class. The study aimed to construct a localised unit of work that focuses on Chinese pictographic characters to improve student engagement. It adopted suggestions from local teachers and then applied six lessons for a specific class within a Western Sydney public school context. Data were collected from interviews, reflective journals, formative assessments, post-it notes questions and students’ focus groups. The teacher-researcher concludes that the unit of work has many positive effects. Games, pictures and videos help to increase student engagement behaviourally, emotionally and cognitively. Further, the pictographs help students develop stronger memories of the Chinese characters they learned. However, future research could focus on the writing order and pronunciation of Hanzi

Searching for musical features using natural language queries: the C@merata evaluations at MediaEval

Musicological texts about classical music frequently include detailed technical discussions concerning the works being analysed. These references can be specific (e.g. C sharp in the treble clef) or general (fugal passage, Thor’s Hammer).Experts can usually identify the features in question in music scores but a means of performing this task automatically could be very useful for experts and beginnersalike. Following work on textual question answering over many years as co-or-ganisers of the QA tasks at the Cross Language Evaluation Forum, we decided in 2013 to propose a new type of task where the input would be a natural language phrase, together with a music score in MusicXML, and the required output would be one or more matching passages in the score. We report here on 3 years of theC@merata task at MediaEval. We describe the design of the task, the evaluation methods we devised for it, the approaches adopted by participant systems and the results obtained. Finally, we assess the progress which has been made in aligning natural language text with music and map out the main steps for the future. The novel aspects of this work are: (1) the task itself, linking musical references to actual music scores, (2) the evaluation methods we devised, based on modified versions of precision and recall, applied to demarcated musical passages, and (3) the progress which has been made in analysing and interpreting detailed technical references to music within texts

Character Recognition

Character recognition is one of the pattern recognition technologies that are most widely used in practical applications. This book presents recent advances that are relevant to character recognition, from technical topics such as image processing, feature extraction or classification, to new applications including human-computer interfaces. The goal of this book is to provide a reference source for academic research and for professionals working in the character recognition field

Evaluating the impact of adopting a component-based approach within the automotive domain

Component-based technology applied to the control system of production machinery is one of the new research developments in the automotive sector. Although it is important to evaluate the technical aspects of this new paradigm, an appreciation of the impact from the business and human aspects is equally important to the stakeholders in the industry. However, the current evaluation approaches do not offer a method to capture and analyse the component-based technology that is simple to use and produces results that are readily understood by the stakeholders involved in the process. This study is based upon a research project at Loughborough University to look into the effect of the implementation of a component-based control system for production machinery in the automotive sector (referred to as the component-based approach) and is focused on the business and the human aspects of the approach. [Continues.

Wanderer: Spring 2013

A special publication created by Visual Journalism students. 56 pages. Cover article: 25 International Faculty Tell Their Stories.https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/wanderer/1001/thumbnail.jp

AN EXAMINED LIFE OF A LANGUAGE TEACHER OF CHINESE: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATION INTO AGENCY

There is a paucity of research about and done by L2 Chinese educators regarding the theoretical construct of agency. It is also noted that the qualitative inquiry is marginalized in L2 Chinese research field, let alone the narrative study of the agency of experienced by L2 Chinese-teachers. In this dissertation research, I aim at filling in the gap by conducting a longitudinal autoethnography which captures over a decade (1997-2017) of my personal and professional development with an agency perspective. The highly personalized autoethnographic accounts open up my personal and professional life as an experienced, college-level, transnational, early 40’s female native Chinese teacher from mainland China. Using socio-cultural sensibilities and ecological approach of agency to scrutinize the paradigm shifts and behavioral changes over extended periods of time, I strive to make visible my active sense-making of affordances and constraints of diverse societal and educational surroundings in Indonesia, the US, China and the US again. I hope to exam the personal world and intellectual, professional trajectory over a long time to extend readers’ sociological understanding (Sparkes, 2000) of the rich and complex life of a language teacher. The critical reflexive analysis, deep reflection, and writing as analysis inquiry of my own transformations are demonstrated in multiple shifting identities over time and across different milieu, from English as a foreign language teacher, to Chinese as a second language teacher within China and to Chinese as a foreign language teacher outside Chinese-speaking context, from a teacher-researcher, teacher mentor, teacher educator, to a lifelong teacher-learner. The manifestations of various forms of agency-as-achievements and the evolvement of agency-as-capacities have also been examined. One of the main impetuses of this autoethnographic project is creating an alternative narrative of a nonconformist so as to challenge the existing stereotypical narratives of Chineseness in work-abroad native-speaking China-born teachers as well as traditional development trajectory of language teachers. My concrete experiences as a transcultural, bilingual, and bicultural (L1 Chinese, L2 English) language educator together with intellectual biography exhibit a unique personal, scholarly and professional growth in a postmodern, globalized, multicultural era through various social identities and evolving agency development. Using the power of autoethnography, I make explicit the multiplicity of self-representation and critically self-reflective learning about agency. This work hopes to inspire reflective and reflexive practices in other L2 educators, especially experienced in-service language teachers, to destabilize their ideologies and beliefs regarding L2 education and reflective practice, to educate their attention to social aspects of language learning and teaching, and to humanized language education. Ultimately, readers are encouraged to move into action to explore the notion of agency and use the power of autoethnography in language education and on language education