5,346 research outputs found
An exploration of the attitudes and beliefs of teacher trainers and teacher trainees concerning the use of the L1 in the EFL classroom
One important conflict within English language teaching methodology is concerning the use or exclusion of learners’ first languages (L1) when learning English. Perspectives on the topic range from those in favour of complete avoidance of the L1 in the EFL classroom, constantly striving for an exclusively L2 classroom to those who believe in the value and learning benefit of allowing and, to some extent, encouraging the use of all manner of languages available to the learner. This thesis conducted interviews and surveys in order to provide an in-depth exploration of the attitudes and beliefs of teacher trainers and teacher trainees in North Rhine Westphalia concerning the use of the L1, as well as other potential languages, in the English language classroom. Although the two groups of participants held many similar attitudes and beliefs concerning L1 use, some significant and interesting differences were found. Teacher trainees showed themselves to be more open concerning the use of the L1 than their more experienced counterparts. It remains, however, unclear what exactly the reason for these differences is. A further aspect which became apparent is how the pressures of language choice and of exclusive L2 instruction in the EFL classroom during observed and examination lessons is felt by teacher trainees. This is potentially adding to the overall burden of the teacher training period in NRW. The thesis concludes that an increase in evidence-based teacher education, concerning not only the aspect of L1 use in the EFL classroom but also many other aspects of language teaching could be prudent in the continued development of well-informed best-practice approaches. This thesis holds the standpoint that complete eradication of the L1 in the EFL classroom is counterproductive to successful language learning. Judicious use of the L1 and the development of a more plurilingusitic attitude to language learning, enabling learners to make use of any available linguistic resources, can offer both learners and teachers helpful scaffolding which can facilitate the successful learning of further languages
Identity, Power, and Prestige in Switzerland's Multilingual Education
Switzerland is known for its multilingualism, yet not all languages are represented equally in society. The situation is exacerbated by the influx of heritage languages and English through migration and globalization processes which challenge the traditional education system. This study is the first to investigate how schools in Grisons, Fribourg, and Zurich negotiate neoliberal forces leading to a growing necessity of English, a romanticized view on national languages, and the social justice perspective of institutionalizing heritage languages. It uncovers power and legitimacy issues and showcases students' and teachers' complex identities to advocate equitable multilingual education
Automatic Question Generation to Support Reading Comprehension of Learners - Content Selection, Neural Question Generation, and Educational Evaluation
Simply reading texts passively without actively engaging with their content is suboptimal for text comprehension since learners may miss crucial concepts or misunderstand essential ideas.
In contrast, engaging learners actively by asking questions fosters text comprehension.
However, educational resources frequently lack questions.
Textbooks often contain only a few at the end of a chapter, and informal learning resources such as Wikipedia lack them entirely.
Thus, in this thesis, we study to what extent questions about educational science texts can be automatically generated, tackling two research questions.
The first question concerns selecting learning-relevant passages to guide the generation process.
The second question investigates the generated questions' potential effects and applicability in reading comprehension scenarios.
Our first contribution improves the understanding of neural question generation's quality in education.
We find that the generators' high linguistic quality transfers to educational texts but that they require guidance by educational content selection.
In consequence, we study multiple educational context and answer selection mechanisms.
In our second contribution, we propose novel context selection approaches which target question-worthy sentences in texts.
In contrast to previous works, our context selectors are guided by educational theory.
The proposed methods perform competitive to related work while operating with educationally motivated decision criteria that are easier to understand for educational experts.
The third contribution addresses answer selection methods to guide neural question generation with expected answers.
Our experiments highlight the need for educational corpora for the task. Models trained on noneducational corpora do not transfer well to the educational domain.
Given this discrepancy, we propose a novel corpus construction approach.
It automatically derives educational answer selection corpora from textbooks.
We verify the approach's usefulness by showing that neural models trained on the constructed corpora learn to detect learning-relevant concepts.
In our last contribution, we use the insights from the previous experiments to design, implement, and evaluate an automatic question generator for educational use.
We evaluate the proposed generator intrinsically with an expert annotation study and extrinsically with an empirical reading comprehension study.
The two evaluation scenarios provide a nuanced view of the generated questions' strengths and weaknesses.
Expert annotations attribute an educational value to roughly 60 % of the questions but also reveal various ways in which the questions still fall short of the quality experts desire.
Furthermore, the reader-based evaluation indicates that the proposed educational question generator increases learning outcomes compared to a no-question control group.
In summary, the results of the thesis improve the understanding of the content selection tasks in educational question generation and provide evidence that it can improve reading comprehension.
As such, the proposed approaches are promising tools for authors and learners to promote active reading and thus foster text comprehension
Lift EVERY Voice and Sing: An Intersectional Qualitative Study Examining the Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Queer Faculty and Administrators at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
While there is minimal literature that address the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans* identified students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), the experiences of Black, queer faculty and administrators at HBCUs has not been studied. This intersectional qualitative research study focused on the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer identified faculty and administrators who work at HBCUs. By investigating the intersections of religion, race, gender, and sexuality within a predominantly Black institution, this study aims to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at HBCUs by sharing the experiences of the LGBQ faculty and administrators that previously or currently work at an HBCU as a full-time employee. The research questions that guided this study were 1) How have LGBQ faculty and staff negotiated/navigated their careers at HBCUs? and 2) How do LGBQ faculty and staff at HBCUs influence cultural (relating to LGBQ inclusion) change at the organizational level? The main theoretical framework used was intersectionality and it shaped the chosen methodology and methods. The Politics of Respectability was the second theoretical framework used to describe the intra-racial tensions within the Black/African American community. The study included 60-120 minute interviews with 12 participants. Using intersectionality as a guide, the data were coded and utilized for thematic analysis. Then, an ethnodramatic performance engages readers. The goals of this study were to encourage policy changes, promote inclusivity for LGBQ employees at HBCUs, and provide an expansion to the body of literature in the field pertaining to the experiences of LGBQ faculty and administrators in higher education
New Research and Trends in Higher Education
This book aims to discuss new research and trends on all dimensions of Higher Education, as there is a growing interest in the field of Higher Education, regarding new methodologies, contexts, and technologies. It includes investigations of diverse issues that affect the learning processes in Higher Education: innovations in learning, new pedagogical methods, and new learning contexts.In this sense, original research contributions of research papers, case studies and demonstrations that present original scientific results, methodological aspects, concepts and educational technologies, on the following topics:a) Technological Developments in Higher Education: mobile technology, virtual environments, augmented reality, automation and robotics, and other tools for universal learning, focusing on issues that are not addressed by existing research;b) Digital Higher Education: mobile learning, eLearning, Game-based Learning, social media in education, new learning models and technologies and wearable technologies for education;c) Case Studies in Higher Education: empirical studies in higher education regarding digital technologies, new methodologies, new evaluation techniques and tools, perceptions of learning processes efficiency and digital learning best practice
Understanding Atrocities
Understanding Atrocities is a wide-ranging collection of essays bridging scholarly and community-based efforts to understand and respond to the global, transhistorical problem of genocide. The essays in this volume investigate how evolving, contemporary views on mass atrocity frame and complicate the possibilities for the understanding and prevention of genocide. The contributors ask, among other things, what are the limits of the law, of history, of literature, and of education in understanding and representing genocidal violence? What are the challenges we face in teaching and learning about extreme events such as these, and how does the language we use contribute to or impair what can be taught and learned about genocide? Who gets to decide if it's genocide and who its victims are? And how does the demonization of perpetrators of atrocity prevent us from confronting the complicity of others, or of ourselves? Through a multi-focused and multidisciplinary investigation of these questions, Understanding Atrocities demonstrates the vibrancy and breadth of the contemporary state of genocide studies. With contributions by: Amarnath Amarasingam, Andrew R. Basso, Kristin Burnett, Lori Chambers, Laura Beth Cohen, Travis Hay, Steven Leonard Jacobs, Lorraine Markotic, Sarah Minslow, Donia Mounsef, Adam Muller, Scott W. Murray, Christopher Powell, and Raffi Sarkissia
Democracy, Decolonization and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada
Using Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (IRS TRC) as an occasion and a lens, this dissertation aims to critically assess the capacity of the Canadian state to make good on the promise of transformation that the politics of reconciliation harbours. Canada’s IRS TRC is an opportunity to renew reflection on the sort of transformations that might bring about post-settler-colonial forms of commonality that do not presuppose the impossibility of decolonization and Indigenous self-determination. Using the topic of collective memory and methods drawn from emergent anti-imperialist sub-traditions in Western political thought, this dissertation forwards the claim that the realization of political reconciliation’s transformative potential entails both democratic and decolonial elements. This, in turn, grounds an attempt to bring radical democratic thought (with a focus on Sheldon S. Wolin) and Indigenous resurgence theory (with an emphasis on Glen S. Coulthard) into a conversation based on the assumption that not only are these two traditions of political thought not mutually exclusive but can be brought together in ways that can contribute towards the realization of political reconciliation’s transformative potential. This, however, entails a systematic decolonization of those elements of the foundations of Western democratic thought that render it amenable to imperial projects as a condition for freeing it up as a resource in the struggle for decolonization. This approach resulted in a twofold conclusion. First, the politics of reconciliation in liberal-democratic, settler-colonial contexts can be broadly divided into two contrasting and diametrically opposed models of political reconciliation: reconciliation ‘from above’ and reconciliation ‘from below.’ The second conclusion is that the form that the politics of reconciliation assumed in Canada is a form of reconciliation ‘from above,’ which, amongst other things, might be characterized by its selective social amnesia, its non-participatory and elitist decision-making processes and an incapacity to make good on the promise of change that the politics of reconciliation harbours. The liberal-democratic settler state’s inability to facilitate political reconciliation’s transformative potential is due to an enduring structural predisposition to promote the opposite of a decolonizing transformation in Indigenous-state relations in settler-colonial contexts such as Canada
'Exarcheia doesn't exist': Authenticity, Resistance and Archival Politics in Athens
My thesis investigates the ways people, materialities and urban spaces interact to form affective ecologies and produce historicity. It focuses on the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, Athens’ contested political topography par excellence, known for its production of radical politics of discontent and resistance to state oppression and eoliberal capitalism. Embracing Exarcheia’s controversial status within Greek vernacular, media and state discourses, this thesis aims to unpick the neighbourhoods’ socio-spatial assemblage imbued with affect and formed through the numerous (mis)understandings and (mis)interpretations rooted in its turbulent political history. Drawing on theory on urban spaces, affect, hauntology and archival politics, I argue for Exarcheia as an unwavering archival space composed of affective chronotopes – (in)tangible loci that defy space and temporality. I posit that the interwoven narratives and materialities emerging in my fieldwork are persistently – and perhaps obsessively – reiterating themselves and remaining imprinted on the neighbourhood’s landscape as an incessant reminder of violent histories that the state often seeks to erase and forget. Through this analysis, I contribute to understandings of place as a primary ethnographic ‘object’ and the ways in which place forms complex interactions and relationships with social actors, shapes their subjectivities, retains and bestows their memories and senses of historicity
- …