Effectiveness of Conference Feedback on College Students’ Composition in the English as a Second Language (ESL) Context

This article examines the negotiation teacher-student feedback conferences in a college writing course. The conferences were held in groups with one teacher and six participants who agreed to take part in this study. The study includes the right for the teacher to offer advice and to criticize, which is often considered to be threatening in more normal contexts. However, as the data analysis shows, participants also interact in ways that challenge the common norms, some of which might be considered more conventionally attacking. The article argues that conference feedback should be analyzed at the level of interaction (Haugh and Bargiela-Chiappini, 2010) and that situated and contextual detail is relevant to its analysis. The study suggests that teachers’ in a second language writing classroom should provide conference feedback so that student understand what the teachers’ expect of them and, provides a useful theoretical framework for doing so. The conclusion of the study draws on real-life talk-in-interaction (from transcribed recordings), the participants’ perspectives (from focus groups and interviews) and situated detail (from field-notes) to produce a contextualized and nuanced analysis. Keywords: Feedback, Education, Teaching Methodolog

Effectiveness of conference feedback on college students’ composition in the English as a Second Language (ESL) context

This article examines the negotiation teacher-student feedback conferences in a college writing course. The conferences were held in groups with one teacher and six participants who agreed to take part in this study. The study includes the right for the teacher to offer advice and to criticize, which is often considered to be threatening in more normal contexts. However, as the data analysis shows, participants also interact in ways that challenge the common norms, some of which might be considered more conventionally attacking. The article argues that conference feedback should be analyzed at the level of interaction (Haugh and Bargiela-Chiappini, 2010) and that situated and contextual detail is relevant to its analysis. The study suggests that teachers’ in a second language writing classroom should provide conference feedback so that student understand what the teachers’ expect of them and, provides a useful theoretical framework for doing so. The conclusion of the study draws on real-life talk-in-interaction (from transcribed recordings), the participants’ perspectives (from focus groups and interviews) and situated detail (from field-notes) to produce a contextualized and nuanced analysis

The acquisition of technical terms using the online learning approach among aircraft maintenance learners

Building a good understanding of the technical terms is an essential achievement for aircraft maintenance learners for their future careers in the field of aircraft maintenance. With the recent evolution in educational technologies, teaching and learning technical terms need to be shaped differently. Most studies on technical terms acquisition have been conducted at college levels via the traditional mode. Hence, this qualitative study explored the implementation of the online learning approach as a medium to learn technical terms. Data were collected from in-depth interviews as well as online observations with fourteen first-year aircraft maintenance learners on how the online platform assists in acquiring technical terms. Additional data was obtained from the instructor teaching them. The results of the interview indicated that the learners improved on their technical terms acquisition in four significant aspects such as blended learning, group learning, the role of the lecturer and the utilisation of an online dictionary. Learners also reported that the implementation of the online learning approach enabled collaboration between the lecturer and the learner to improve their online learning experiences. The results presented a much-needed and currently lacking, view into the actual use and the online learning approach for technical terms acquisition among aircraft maintenance learners in this private university