Cosmopolitan speakers and their cultural cartographies

Language learners' increased mobility and the ubiquity of virtual intercultural encounters has challenged traditional ideas of ‘cultures’. Moreover, representations of cultures as consumable life-choices has meant that learners are no longer locked into standard and static cultural identities. Language learners are better defined as cosmopolitan individuals with subjective and complex socio-political and historical identities. Such models push the boundaries of current concepts in language pedagogy to new understandings of who the language learner is and a refashioning of the cultural maps they inhabit. This article presents a model for cultural understanding that draws on the theoretical framework of Beck's Cosmopolitan Vision and its related concepts of ‘Banal Cosmopolitanism’ and ‘Cosmopolitan Empathy’. Narrative accounts are used to illustrate the experience of a group of students of Arabic and Serbian/Croatian and their use of the cultural resources at their disposal to construct their own subjective cosmopolitan life-worlds. Through the analysis of learners' everyday cultural practices inside and outside the educational environment, the scope of the intercultural experience is revisited and a new paradigm for the language learner is presented. The Cosmopolitan Speaker (CS) described in this article is a subject who adopts a flâneur-like disposition to reflect on and scrutinise the target culture. Armed with this highly personal interpretation of reality, CSs will be able to take part in their own cultural trajectories and imagine and ‘figure’ their own cartography of the world

Feedback on feedback: eliciting learners’ responses to written feedback through student-generated screencasts

Despite the potential benefits of assignment feedback, learners often fail to use it effectively. This study examines the ways in which adult distance learners engage with written feedback on one of their assignments. Participants were 10 undergraduates studying Spanish at the Open University, UK. Their responses to feedback were elicited by means of student-generated screencast (Jing®) recordings in which students talked through the feedback written by their tutors. The recordings were analysed in terms of the students’ cognitive, affective and metacognitive responses to the tutors’ feedback. Results show that, while students do engage with tutor feedback and make active efforts to integrate it, they sometimes use ineffective strategies, especially when tutor and student make different assumptions about the role of feedback. The richness of the data obtained from the Feedback on feedback (F on F) method suggests that it has the potential to promote much needed feedback dialogue between students and tutors

Adult beginner distance language learner perceptions and use of assignment feedback

This qualitative study examines perceptions and use of assignment feedback among adult beginner modern foreign language learners on higher education distance learning courses. A survey of responses to feedback on assignments by 43 Open University students on beginner language courses in Spanish, French, and German indicated that respondents can be classified into three groups: those who use feedback strategically by integrating it into the learning process and comparing it with, for example, informal feedback from interaction with native speakers, those who take note of feedback, but seem not to use it strategically, and those who appear to take little account of either marks or feedback. The first group proved to be the most confident and most likely to maintain their motivation in the longer term. The conclusion discusses some of the pedagogical and policy implications of the findings

A922 Sequential measurement of 1 hour creatinine clearance (1-CRCL) in critically ill patients at risk of acute kidney injury (AKI)

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Mobile Collaboration for Language Learning and Cultural Learning

Locations outside the classroom represent social spaces or “settings” that offer a variety of affordances for language learning, but these opportunities will not be fully realized unless we make efforts to propose and try out new designs for learning in these settings. It is especially important to consider how learners might assemble, configure or help create learning designs that involve mobile technologies, tasks and resources corresponding to their needs, in readiness for chance encounters and for more sustained learning. Two key questions are pertinent to the issues outlined above when considering the nexus of collaboration, cultural experiences, and the interface between formal and informal learning: (1) What are the key findings from research studies and reported experiences of collaboration in mobile language learning, with particular reference to informal settings and cultural learning? (2) What do these findings mean for teacher roles, and how can learners be supported and developed to engage more effectively in collaborative and cultural mobile language learning? These two broad questions set the scene for this chapter and guide its structure. In the first part, we focus on existing studies to examine what has been tried and to establish the key findings. The existing studies include some in which we have been involved, often as lead researchers. After that, we consider teachers’ and learners’ changing roles and the foregrounding or development of competencies and skills that are important for more informal, and perhaps increasingly collaborative, mobile language learning. In the conclusion we propose a list of five areas of focus for teachers and learners to become aware that language learning with mobiles can operate across a highly‐flexible continuum from informal to formal learning and intercultural exchange

The language of food: carving out a place for food studies in language curricula

This chapter argues for the place of food studies in tertiary language studies programs. With a myriad of changes to education throughout the twentieth century, language study lost its eminent position as a gateway to higher learning, which means we are required to articulate our relevance to students and university governance. Food and food culture have great appeal amongst students and carving out a place for food studies in our language curricula allows us to generate a new interest amongst a changed student cohort. As well as providing students with an enriching way of learning about other cultures, the non-canonical and universal phenomenon of food or food discourse has the advantage of being immediately accessible to our students who all have their own experiences of food. The study of food also provides us with an opportunity to enhance students’ intercultural skills, which have increasing value in the global workplace. Understanding the multiple layers of meaning attached to food and food culture helps students to develop a sensitivity to the importance of the everyday in their interactions with other cultures. We will discuss this synergy between languages and food studies in the context of tertiary language studies in Spanish and Italian, detailing some of the initiatives in this area