137 research outputs found

    Using songs for beginners to learn Chinese : an action research study of local/global language education

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    Despite the previous research into the use of music, particularly songs, in teaching English, Spanish, and many other languages, the implication of employing songs in Chinese teaching classrooms is still under-developed. This research fills the gap in this area by combining pre-existing theories with practice in Sydney public school. Through examining student’s responses and feedbacks, the effectiveness of using songs in Chinese teaching is critically analysed, and the basic procedures in classroom use is generated. It is argued that since this pedagogy provides students with the opportunity to practice Chinese through entertaining and culturally rich songs, it enhances the learnability of Chinese as a second language. There are three major findings to support this argument: 1. The use of songs can aid in the recall of lexical input by producing mental repetition. 2. Through learning with supporting activities, students can be scaffolded to recognise and reconstruct grammatical structure. 3. Songs can provide motivations for students to explore Chinese and cultural learning. This thesis is part of the researches on the use of music in language teaching. It contributes to the future pedagogical researches regarding language teaching, especially Chinese teaching domain. More importantly, by engaging more students in Chinese learning, it can enhance the popularisation of Chinese in Australian schools

    Social mobilization or street crimes

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    This article deals with processes of marginalization and patterns of segregation in contemporary Sweden, which have transformed the former welfare state towards increased segregation and inequality between different social groups. Two ethnographic studies on young men living in stigmatized metropolitan areas are used in discussion and analysis. During the 1990s we could see the birth and growth of new forms of poverty in multi-ethnic suburbs of the metropolitan districts of Sweden. During the last two decades, youth subcultures oriented towards Reggae and Hip hop have grown and attracted many young people in these metropolitan areas. This article focuses on how two youth collectives in two metropolitan areas developed different strategies to cope with discrimination, second class citizenship and territorial stigmatization. In both these collectives it is possible so see how informal learning processes, embedded in cultural praxis of the youth groups and empowered by a connection to African-American music cultures, enable these groups and individuals to express themselves. The youth collective in one suburbs articulates a social and political criticism that could be compared to the cultural aspirations of the labour movement in the early part of the last century. The youth from the other neighbourhood have a strong fascination with criminal out-law culture and do not articulate themselves in the same way as members of the other group. Still their cultural expressions must be understood as ways to deal with their positions as marginalized, immigrant youth

    Hip Hop and Ya Don't Stop: Using Hip Hop to Engage Marginalized Youth in Contemporary Urban Classrooms in Canada

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    This study uses two research methodologies: retrospective life histories, and qualitative research method in the form of youth questionnaires to examine student beliefs and connections to hip hop culture as a tool for student engagement. Through open-ended questionnaires with ten Canadian urban youths in the City of Toronto, this qualitative study revealed concepts of identity, student engagement, isolation and inclusion. The purpose of the study was to provide an empowering place for youth to be understood and heard in relation to their own educational journeys, capturing both the positive and negative experiences they have encountered. As a result of the study, I, the researcher was able to locate and analyze my own passion for hip hop through the retrospective life history method. Hip hop offers an array of resources, knowledge and consciousness which students can transfer across academic disciplines. This study offers recommendations for using hip hop as pedagogy to engage marginalized youth and thus lead to less isolation and more success. In order to understand hip hop’s place in schools across Canada it is important to analyze educational policies, both past and present and how these policies ultimately affect the implementation of hip hop pedagogy, which was employed in this stud

    The Stained Glass of Knowledge: On Understanding Novice Mental Models of Computing

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    Learning to program can be a novel experience. The rigidity of programming can be at odds with beginning programmer\u27s existing perceptions, and the concepts can feel entirely unfamiliar. These observations motivated this research, which explores two major questions: What factors influence how novices learn programming? and How can analogy by more appropriately leveraged in programming education? This dissertation investigates the factors influencing novice programming through multiple methods. The CS1 classroom is observed as a whole system , with consideration to the factors present in it that can influence the learning process. Learning\u27s cognitive processes are elaborated to ground exploration into specifically learning programming. This includes extensive literature review spanning multiple disciplines. This allows positioning to guide the investigation. The literature survey also contributes to greater understanding of learning cognition within computing education research through its disciplinary depth. The focus on analogy with the second question is motivated through the factors observed in the first question. Analogy\u27s role in cognition and in education is observed, and the analogical inclinations of technology as a field are showcased. Stigma surrounds the use of analogy in computer science education in spite of these indications. This motivated investigation on how the use of analogy could be better addressed in programming education in order to utilize its value. This research presents a tool for the design of well-formed analogy in programming to answer this question. It also investigates additional forms analogy can take in the classroom setting, proposing relevant cultural forms such as memes can be analogical vehicles that promote learner engagement. This research presents a strong case for the value of analogy use in the CS1 classroom, and provides a tool to facilitate the design of well-formed analogies. In identifying ways to better leverage analogy in the programming classroom, presenting this research will hopefully contribute to dispelling analogy\u27s bad reputation in computing education. By exploring factors that contribute to the learning process in CS1, this research frames education design as experience design. This motivates methods and considerations from user experience design, and investigates aspects of the whole system that can promote or deter a learner\u27s experience. This dissertation presents findings on understanding the learner\u27s experience in the programming classroom, and how analogy can be used to benefit their learning process

    Miss mek wi trai: Using Multiliteracies Pedagogy to Effect Changes in Jamaica Inner-city Grade 7 Students' English Learning

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    My four-month research project is the first recorded Jamaican study to explore if and how multiliteracies pedagogy (MLS) paired with sociocultural theory (SCT) can improve inner-city students English language development (ELD) and engagement. In diglossic Jamaica, social class typically dictates Jamaican language abilities. Typically, most upper- and middle-class Jamaicans speak English, while most members of the Jamaican lower class speak Patois. English is the language of the Jamaican curriculum, employment and power. Improvement in my participants EDL will improve their access to better-paying jobs and higher education. I conducted my research in the following sequential manner: 1) a month of classroom observation of the original English teachers classroom; 2) two months where I taught my experiential communicative lessons inspired by MLS and SCT; 3) four student focus group interviews and one teacher interview; and, 4) document analysis of examples of students three individual work (two after-lesson reflections and a paragraph of narrative account). All of these data collection tools ensured that I captured my participants meaning making and subjectivities. My research findings support and diverge from the weight of evidence in multiliteracies pedagogy and sociocultural theory. Similar to other research employing MLS and SCT, my findings revealed that my participants became more engaged in their English learning during my experiential teaching than they were in their original English language class. The majority of the students writing skills also improved. However, unlike MLS and SCT based research, in my study there was not a strong relationship between the students emotional engagement and their behavioural engagement; there was also no relationship between the students emotional engagement and improvement in language development. I recommend that teachers incorporate multiliteracies-inspired communicative activities in their English classes, as these activities engage students and promote English language development. I also suggest that multiliteracies researchers implement goodbehavioural strategies to ensure that students are engaged cognitively, emotionally and behaviourally. Moreover, I encourage teachers, future researchers and the Jamaican Ministry of Education to respect the students voices and agency, rather than merely incorporating their lived experiences in their school learning

    SCHOOLED: Hiphop Composition at the Predominantly White University

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    This dissertation asks what hiphop is doing in predominantly white higher-educational contexts, specifically in composition classrooms. Using ethnographic, autoethnographic, and historical methods, it finds that hiphop’s work in composition classrooms at PWIs is contradictory. This mixed-methods investigation suggests that the contradictory relation of white fans, students, and institutions to hiphop is shaped on the one hand by white listeners’ increasing identification with the historical struggles of African Americans under capitalism, and on the other hand, by disidentification or abjectification of African Americans in an effort to “win” the zero-sum game of capitalism. This contradiction results in a paradoxical situation where white fans—and white institutions—love hiphop and yet harbor antiblack views about the Black communities and Black students who make hiphop possible. However, the findings also suggest that identifying this tension offers writing instructors an opportunity to be more explicit about working towards anti-racist goals in the hiphop composition classroom. The dissertation’s historical study, ethnographic and autoethnographic studies, and review of contemporary hiphop and composition scholarship suggest that teaching and practicing reflexivity are core solutions to the paradoxical rhetorical action of hiphop in predominantly white spaces. This entails teaching students to reflectively identify and write about their own positionalities as well as asking teachers and administrators to recognize and explicitly acknowledge their own positionalities. The first chapter introduces the problematic of hiphop’s significant presence in elite PWIs despite hiphop’s emergence as a revolutionary Black art form in 1970s New York and the contemporary mass closure of public educational institutions for Black and poor students in the United States. It argues that, given the widespread uptake of Black language and discourse practices by millennials and youth, all composition classes should teach Black language and discourse practices, including at PWIs. Chapter 2 positions critical reflexivity as the central methodological value of this mixed-methods research study, contextualizing the white female author’s relationship with hiphop and the development of her research within research and writing on whiteness in hiphop culture and hiphop pedagogy. Chapter 3, a historical study of the Open Admissions movement at the City University of New York, recontextualizes early hiphop culture within the creative production of Black and Puerto Rican youths’ artistic and educational movements of late 1960s and 1970s New York City, arguing for a reconsideration of the role that creative writing teachers of color and cultural rhetorics education broadly defined played both in the successes of Basic Writing under CUNY Open Admissions and the early history of hiphop. Chapter 4 offers hiphop as a critical intervention to the Writing About Writing movement, arguing that the movement’s prioritization of institutional writing practices over students’ extracurricular and power-saturated language practices constitutes linguistic innocence. A classroom study of 4 hiphop composition classrooms demonstrates the pervasive antiblackness of students’ attitudes about language and advocates a reflexive, literacy-focused hiphop composition pedagogy to teach students a socially conscious understanding of the major concepts of composition studies. Finally, chapter 5 considers hiphop composition in the context of writing program administration, including issues of labor, disciplinarity, and graduate student teaching, retention, and training. Using dialogue with and materials from Nana Adjei-Brenyah, who taught two of the classes studied in chapter 4, this chapter highlights the role hiphop can play in valuing the diverse language practices and writing expertises of graduate student composition instructors from non-normative identity groups. The dissertation closes with a call for composition instruction that recognizes how whiteness, Blackness, and power circulate through all students’ everyday language and composing practices
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