A blended approach in teaching an EAP course: Malaysian instructors’ perceptions of the new course materials

This paper reports on a study which examines instructors’ perceptions of the new commercial course materials that comprises a course book and online practice reinforcement activities. The materials were used to teach undergraduate English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course for Social Sciences at a Malaysian public university. This represents the main facet of the blended approach introduced when the course was redesigned. The sample comprises ten instructors who taught the course for one semester. Three qualitative instruments were utilized to elicit data namely, instructor-researcher reflective notes, focus group discussion and one-to-one interviews. The results of the study were generally positive, however, two main concerns were raised. The first was regarding the difficulty level of the reading comprehension activities in the course book which majority of the instructors felt were too simple and not challenging enough for their students. The second was on internet connectivity to the online practice website which the instructors felt was too slow and was unable to support the students efficiently. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the findings and provides suggestions for the next cycle of the researc

Expectations eclipsed in foreign language education: learners and educators on an ongoing journey / edited by Hülya Görür-Atabaş, Sharon Turner.

Between June 2-4, 2011 Sabancı University School of Languages welcomed colleagues from 21 different countries to a collaborative exploration of the challenging and inspiring journey of learners and educators in the field of language education.\ud \ud The conference provided an opportunity for all stakeholders to share their views on language education. Colleagues met with world-renowned experts and authors in the fields of education and psychology, faculty and administrators from various universities and institutions, teachers from secondary educational backgrounds and higher education, as well as learners whose voices are often not directly shared but usually reported.\ud \ud The conference name, Eclipsing Expectations, was inspired by two natural phenomena, a solar eclipse directly before the conference, and a lunar eclipse, immediately after. Learners and educators were hereby invited to join a journey to observe, learn and exchange ideas in orde

Trialing project-based learning in a new EAP ESP course: A collaborative reflective practice of three college English teachers

Currently in many Chinese universities, the traditional College English course is facing the risk of being ‘marginalized’, replaced or even removed, and many hours previously allocated to the course are now being taken by EAP or ESP. At X University in northern China, a curriculum reform as such is taking place, as a result of which a new course has been created called ‘xue ke’ English. Despite the fact that ‘xue ke’ means subject literally, the course designer has made it clear that subject content is not the target, nor is the course the same as EAP or ESP. This curriculum initiative, while possibly having been justified with a rationale of some kind (e.g. to meet with changing social and/or academic needs of students and/or institutions), this is posing a great challenge for, as well as considerable pressure on, a number of College English teachers who have taught this single course for almost their entire teaching career. In such a context, three teachers formed a peer support group in Semester One this year, to work collaboratively co-tackling the challenge, and they chose Project-Based Learning (PBL) for the new course. This presentation will report on the implementation of this project, including the overall designing, operational procedure, and the teachers’ reflections. Based on discussion, pre-agreement was reached on the purpose and manner of collaboration as offering peer support for more effective teaching and learning and fulfilling and pleasant professional development. A WeChat group was set up as the chief platform for messaging, idea-sharing, and resource-exchanging. Physical meetings were supplementary, with sound agenda but flexible time, and venues. Mosoteach cloud class (lan mo yun ban ke) was established as a tool for virtual learning, employed both in and after class. Discussions were held at the beginning of the semester which determined only brief outlines for PBL implementation and allowed space for everyone to autonomously explore in their own way. Constant further discussions followed, which generated a great deal of opportunities for peer learning and lesson plan modifications. A reflective journal, in a greater or lesser detailed manner, was also kept by each teacher to record the journey of the collaboration. At the end of the semester, it was commonly recognized that, although challenges existed, the collaboration was overall a success and they were all willing to continue with it and endeavor to refine it to be a more professional and productive approach

Advanced Students’ Oral Fluency: The Neglected Component in the CLT Classroom?

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

Educational Technology Topic Guide

This guide aims to contribute to what we know about the relationship between educational technology (edtech) and educational outcomes by addressing the following overarching question: What is the evidence that the use of edtech, by teachers or students, impacts teaching and learning practices, or learning outcomes? It also offers recommendations to support advisors to strengthen the design, implementation and evaluation of programmes that use edtech. We define edtech as the use of digital or electronic technologies and materials to support teaching and learning. Recognising that technology alone does not enhance learning, evaluations must also consider how programmes are designed and implemented, how teachers are supported, how communities are developed and how outcomes are measured (see http://tel.ac.uk/about-3/, 2014). Effective edtech programmes are characterised by: a clear and specific curriculum focus the use of relevant curriculum materials a focus on teacher development and pedagogy evaluation mechanisms that go beyond outputs. These findings come from a wide range of technology use including: interactive radio instruction (IRI) classroom audio or video resources accessed via teachers’ mobile phones student tablets and eReaders computer-assisted learning (CAL) to supplement classroom teaching. However, there are also examples of large-scale investment in edtech – particularly computers for student use – that produce limited educational outcomes. We need to know more about: how to support teachers to develop appropriate, relevant practices using edtech how such practices are enacted in schools, and what factors contribute to or mitigate against successful outcomes. Recommendations: 1. Edtech programmes should focus on enabling educational change, not delivering technology. In doing so, programmes should provide adequate support for teachers and aim to capture changes in teaching practice and learning outcomes in evaluation. 2. Advisors should support proposals that further develop successful practices or that address gaps in evidence and understanding. 3. Advisors should discourage proposals that have an emphasis on technology over education, weak programmatic support or poor evaluation. 4. In design and evaluation, value-for-money metrics and cost-effectiveness analyses should be carried out

Dictionary skills in advanced learners’ coursebooks — Materials survey

Nowadays, almost 65 years after the publication of the first advanced learner’s dictionary, this particular consultation source is considered “a useful addition to any [language] course” (Sharma & Barret, 2007: 52). However, as it was remarked by Leany (2007: 1), the ability to successfully utilize advanced learner’s dictionaries requires a considerable amount of practice on the part of students. Thus, dictionary skills appear to constitute one of the key aspects of EFL education. Therefore, the aim of this article is to identify key dictionary skills and describe how they are promoted in advanced learner’s coursebooks. Following the set of guidelines described in Leany (2007) and Welker (2010), the authors developed criteria that were used to assess the dictionary-oriented contents of selected teaching materials. It is hoped that this article highlights the advantages and exposes the shortcomings of dictionary-oriented materials and activities included in EFL coursebooks

Identifying Indonesian-core Vocabulary for Teaching English to Indonesian Preschool Children: a Corpus-based Research

This corpus-based research focuses on building a corpus of Indonesian children's storybooks to find the frequent content words in order to identify Indonesian-core vocabulary for teaching English to Indonesian preschool children. The data was gathered from 131 Indo¬nesian children's storybooks, which resulted in a corpus of 134,320 words. These data were run through a frequency menu in MonoConc Pro, a corpus program. Data analysis was analyzed by selecting the frequent nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs before each of them was lemmatized. The result showed that the children were already exposed to both ordinary and imaginative concepts, antonym in adjective, time reference, and compound nouns. The narrative discourse clearly influenced the kind of verbs the children exposed t