Is there language teaching after global English?

This study documents a case of language education decline, and the role that distance-teaching expertise, allied with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) experience, can play in alleviating the problem. In the United Kingdom a number of factors have led to a crisis in the teaching and learning of European Languages Other Than English (ELOTE). One of the main determiners is the dominance of English as a lingua franca for Continental Western European countries, and another the political reluctance of the part of British governments to engage fully with the European Union. In the country where English is the mother tongue, the position of ELOTE is particularly critical. After quantifying the decline in demand for these languages, I will look at different ways in which language-teaching professionals have attempted to fight back, and I will focus on the benefits that may be derived from a strategy that combines ICT capacity with distance-learning methodologies, using the UK Open University (UKOU) as an example. The lessons drawn by that institution in different discipline areas over two decades will be applied to languages

Interactive task design: Metachat and the whole learner

In this chapter the focus is on conversations about language between adult learners online, in synchronous and asynchronous postings. Socio-affective and social-semiotic perspectives are used, thus distancing the work somewhat from cognitive ways of looking at tasks. Because adults come to the task with diverse knowledge of both L2 and L1, the expectation is that metalinguistic interaction will enable them to swap expert and novice roles with each other within the constantly changing dynamics of the classroom. This if shown to be the case would advance an educational agenda favouring learner-directedness. Secondly, as metalinguistic conversations develop in directions that the learners feel like following, a greater degree of contingency can arise. This is considered in this paper as motivational for adults, and also as progressive, following van Lier (1996: 180) for whom in a contingent conversation "the agenda is shared by all participants and educational reality may be transformed". However, in seeking to satisfy his condition of contingency, the problem of designing tasks for greater spontaneity proves difficult. Therefore this study provide an ethnographic account of metalinguistic conversations by learners engaged in an online task, Simuligne, designed to address this difficulty. After studying data from the project forums, chat rooms and emails, we introduce a new perspective on the function of these conversations, which holds pointers for task design

Introduction: a Frame for the Discussion of Learning Cultures

In this chapter the authors identify a gap in research on culture in online learning and offer a frame for the discussion of the best-known frameworks available for cultural analysis outside the online world. They go on to describe the developments driving the need to problematize 'learning cultures' for the online world, such as the growth of multiculturality, the expansion of transnational e-learning and new media communication practices

Conclusion: Directions for Research in Online Learning Cultures

In this chapter, the authors review issues currently under-represented in research on the cultural dimensions of e-learning, such as the institutional cultural hegemony over pedagogy that is enjoyed by Westernized constructions of learning and teaching, identity-work carried out by participants in linguistic and cultural online communication, and issues of power and embodiment in network-based language learning. The Open Educational Resources initiative is identified as a site for future research on learning cultures

The Web for French grammar: a tool, a resource or a waste of time?

The paper reviews selected Web sites for French grammar, from the student' point of view. The investigation looks at the content of sites and potential for learning.The conclusion is that the Web for French is both underused and chaotic but there is evidence that, with imagination, it could become a useful resource

Supporting language students' interactions in Web-based conferencing

In this study we look at online tutor strategies for the support of students learning a second language with the help of a Web-based asynchronous textual conference. Our previous research has shown us that in such a conference environment, communicative activities can be mixed with reflective tasks, where students are encouraged to exchange reflections on the language being studied, and on their own learning experience. While we have found that such a mix can be beneficial for language learning, nevertheless there are further efforts to be made in persuading learners to integrate linguistic task completion with reflective work, in an interactive mode. Online tutors have an important role to play in furthering this aim, and in this study we look at the strategies used by three tutors who participated in a project with students of French at the Open University in 1998. First we propose a categorisation - according to message-type - of interactions found in the project's three conferences. Then we compare interactions in the three groups and, based on the pattern and content of tutor intervention, we distinguish between two main tutorial styles, which we associate with two different types of student behaviour, one more oriented towards communication, and the other more reflective. We conclude by suggesting ways in which tutors could support online learners in trying to integrate those learning approaches more closely

“Conversations réflexives” dans la classe de langues virtuelle par conférence asynchrone

A l'Open University, université britannique de télé-enseignement, les concepteurs de matériaux utilisent depuis longtemps des pédagogies qui amènent l'apprenant à réfléchir sur son apprentissage et à expliciter cette réflexion. Or aujourd'hui les Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication (TIC) leur permettent de faire interagir apprenants, professeurs et locuteurs natifs. Ainsi l'apprenant participe à la communication et reçoit en retour des messages en langue cible, dont il se sert pour améliorer sa compétence communicative. Qu'en est-il, dès lors, du rôle de la réflexion consciente dans le processus d'apprentissage ? Vu les importantes possibilités d'interactivité offertes par les TIC, doit-on encore prôner la réflexion consciente dans le télé-enseignement ? Nous répondons par l'affirmative, considérant que les concepteurs d'environnements virtuels doivent faciliter et la réflexion consciente et l'interactivité spontanée. Nous soutenons que la conférence télématique asynchrone est un outil qui permet d'atteindre cet objectif. Nous cherchons à voir dans quelle mesure la réflexivité et l'interactivité interviennent dans ce type de conférence, et à préciser la valeur pédagogique de ces échanges. Nous étudions une conférence organisée pour des étudiants de français langue étrangère (FLE) et nous proposons une pédagogie visant à promouvoir ce que nous appelons des “conversations réflexives”, c'est-à-dire des échanges privilégiant des thèmes langagiers ou portant sur l'apprentissage même des langues

LETEC (Learning and Teaching Corpus) Simuligne

Learning and Teaching Corpus of the online educational experiment Simuligne (2001). Its scenario is based on a global simulation for the learning of French as a foreign language. It also includes an intercultural activity, "Interculture", based on the Cultura project. The corpus includes the pedagogical scenario, described in several formats, the research protocol, participant's online interactions and productions (structured in XML), list of participants, licences of use.\ud The LETEC corpus associated (mce.simu.all.all-CP.zip) is organized as an IMS-CP archive. We define a Learning & Teaching Corpus as a structured entity containing all the elements resulting from a communicative on-line learning situation, whose context is described by an educational scenario and a research protocol. The core data collection includes all the interaction data, the productions of the course participants, and the tracks, resulting from the participants’ actions in the learning environment and stored according to the research protocol. In order to be able to be shared, and to respect participant privacy, these data should be anonymised and a license for its use be provided in the corpus. A derived analysis can be linked to a given set of data under consideration, used or computerized for this analysis. An analysis consisting in data annotation/transcription/transformation, accurately connected to its original data, can be merged with the corpus itself, in order for other researchers to compare their own results on a concurrent analysis or to build their complementary analysis upon these results.\ud The definition of a Learning & Teaching Corpus as a whole entity comes from the need of explicit links, between interaction data, context and analyses. This explicit context is crucial for an external researcher to interpret the data and to perform its own analyses.\ud This definition seeks to capture the context of the data stemming from the course in order to allow a researcher to look for, understand and connect this information whether or not he/she was involved in the original course. More details about a LETEC corpus an ist structure at : http://mulce.univ-fcomte.fr/metadata/LETECorpus-en.pd