Get it together:exploring the dynamics of teacher-student interaction in English as a foreign language lessons

The English language plays a major role in Dutch society. It is therefore of crucial importance that students in secondary education develop their communicative competence in this language. Interaction fosters language development, which stresses the need for language learners to practice the skill of shared meaning-making through social interaction. Nienke Smit analyzed teacher-student interaction in English as a foreign language lessons. She developed two new instruments, one for observing teaching strategies for scaffolding reading comprehension and one for question and answer patterns. Results revealed that teachers are most active during the lesson. On average, they ask one question every minute. Students usually respond with very short answers. Long student responses were scarce. Teachers asked very few open questions and these questions often did not lead to longer student answers. This observational study provides insight in the way these classroom interaction patterns emerge. In order to find out whether teachers recognized the results from their own teaching practice, teachers who had not participated in the observational study participated in a validation study. A large majority of the respondents recognized the dominant pattern of closed questions and short answers. They attributed the limited student responses to emotional factors, such as boredom, embarrassment and anxiety. This research showcases how classroom observation might be used to identify the room for growth. In order to facilitate meaningful interaction it is recommended to focus on the learning process in which both the teacher and the students may share the responsibility to get it together

The Teacher’s Turn:Teachers’ Perceptions of Observed Patterns of Classroom Interaction

Insight in the way verbal teacher-student classroom interaction unfolds during the language lesson is of crucial importance for effective teaching. Although classroom observational research is indispensable, it is unable to uncover underlying intentions or motivations for the observed behavior. Teacher cognition research seeks to address the relation between teaching practice and what teachers think. This study reports on the perceptions of a group of English as a foreign language teachers (n = 57) who were asked to reflect on results from a classroom observation study about EFL teacher-student interaction in a similar teaching context. A large majority (82%) of the respondents recognized the observed pattern of closed teacher questions and limited student responses. This majority indicated that student participation in their own lessons is similar to the observed lessons or lower. Respondents attributed the pattern of high teacher activity and low student activity to emotional factors rather than to students’ proficiency levels, lesson content, lesson activities or motivational aspects. According to 51% of the respondents, making students feel more competent by focusing on formative evaluation might improve classroom interaction, whereas 18% of the respondents suggested that interaction could be improved by using different teaching materials

An Observation Tool for EFL Reading Comprehension Teaching Strategies

The present study addresses the validation process of an observation tool for measuring the range of processes in which a teacher is involved when helping secondary school EFL learners comprehend reading input and when facilitating meaningful language output. The observation tool will be used in a professional development programme for scaffolding EFL reading comprehension in secondary schools

The complex dynamics of adaptive teaching:Observing teacher-student interaction in the language classroom

Real-time verbal interactions between foreign language teachers and their students are of vital importance for language development, but classroom interactions are also multi-faceted and complex. The way a teacher understands and responds to learner utterances can be a powerful pedagogical strategy to scaffold learner language development. In this paper we present the Questions and Answers in English Language Teaching coding scheme which can be used to observe and describe the dynamics of teacher questions and student responses in language classrooms. We piloted the instrument in English as a foreign language lessons of four experienced teachers teaching 16 lessons in total. State Space Grids were used to visualize classroom dynamics and quantify intra-individual variability of each lesson. The results show that interactions between teachers and students have the tendency to self-organize and stabilize in one specific area of the grid. Lessons taught by three of the teachers revealed a dominant pattern formed by closed questions and short student responses. One teacher taught lessons in which more complex question and answer sequences were prevalent. These patterns of variability and stability show that teacher-student interactions have the properties of a shallow attractor state. The analysis of moment-to-moment turns in classroom interaction indicate that students in this study generally adapt their response to the level of teacher questions, but that teachers do not seem to adapt their questions to the level of the previous student answer. This suggests that, even for experienced teachers, scaffolding and adaptive teaching might be easier said than done

Navitoclax Most Promising BH3 Mimetic for Combination Therapy in Hodgkin Lymphoma

The treatment of young patients with Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) is often successful but a significant proportion of patients suffers from late toxicity. In the current era there are new opportunities for less toxic and more targeted treatment options. In this respect, the anti-apoptotic pathway is an attractive target since Hodgkin tumor cells abundantly express components of this pathway. We measured the effect of BH3 mimetics that interfere with anti-apoptotic proteins in cell lines, also in combination with the standard of care chemotherapeutic doxorubicin and the recently discovered preclinically active tamoxifen. Several anti-apoptotic BCL-2 family proteins were expressed in each case (n = 84) and in HL cell lines (n = 5). Cell lines were checked for sensitivity to BH3 mimetics by BH3 profiling and metabolic assays and monotherapy was only partially successful. Doxorubicin was synergistic with a BCL-XL inhibitor and BCL2/XL/W inhibitor navitoclax. Tamoxifen that targets the estrogen receptor β present in the mitochondria of the cell lines, could induce cell death, and was synergistic with several BH3 mimetics including/as well as navitoclax. In conclusion, targeting the anti-apoptotic pathway by the triple inhibitor navitoclax in combination with doxorubicin or tamoxifen is a promising treatment strategy in HL