Deconstruction of the Discourse of Femininity: A Case of Thai Girls’ Schools

The study investigates the construction of femininity ideologies of girls-only school websites in Thailand and deconstructs them for analysis at the lexical level. Ideological beliefs underlying the custom of upbringing of young women in Thai cultural contexts are the focus of investigation. We pay a particular attention to how the schools communicate their key messages of vision, mission, core values, and about us on their websites and conduct a corpus-driven discourse analysis on the data. Findings from running tests of frequency and collocation reveal the traits of femininity constructed in the discourse, built the praising of obedience, submissiveness and lady-like features. We conclude that benevolent sexism is a common cultural practice evident in educational institutions.publishedVersio

A LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS OF PATTAYA, THAILAND’S SIN CITY

Pattaya is one of the most popular tourist destinations attracting international travelers. Given its uniquely cosmopolitan nature, it can be regarded as one of the most multilingual and multicultural areas, making it linguistically stand out from other big cities. This paper, therefore, aims to explore the linguistic landscape of Pattaya’s two main streets by analyzing the data (542 signs) collected from commercial signs. The results present the variation and dominance of the use of languages in those public spaces. By highlighting the differences among the various linguistic landscapes, it draws on the factors of business types and population dominance

The Control Zendo: A Game of Inductive Logic for Teaching Automatic Control

Board games and card games have been used with some degree of success in the implementation of active strategies for education, since they stimulate problem solving and increase the learning and engagement of the students. This paper shows how the mechanics of the popular game Zendo have been adapted to teach elements of a basic automatic control course at the University of Stavanger. The result is the Control Zendo, a game of inductive logic in which a hidden rule related to different system's properties (e.g., linearity, time-varyingness or number of input and output variables) must be guessed. Implementational issues and the feedback received by the students who played the game in Spring 2022 are discussed.publishedVersio

Pre-service teachers’ digital experiences through digital pedagogical practices in Norway

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Dimensions of multidisciplinary engagement beyond the classroom in Challenge-Based Learning

The study investigates and reports on the process of engagement in learning through the innovative pedagogical framework – Challenge-based Learning (CBL) – their changing perspectives of learning and their interaction with each other while conducting authentic challenges. This gives way to understanding how learners construct and create meaning out of learning activities, course content and beyond the course objectives. Our mixed method research explores potential impact dimensions of the implementation of challenge based learning on teachers and students. To reveal the potential impact we conducted a focused group interviews with the learners who took part in CBL-integrated lessons and surveyed 68 number of learners who participated in CBL trainings. Our preliminary findings showed that learners undertook news roles by driving their own learning, developing collaborative skills, exploring knowledge to be acquired, and establishing relevance of course content in real contexts which made it meaningful for them to understand. In our presentation, we would like to discuss the implications of CBL implementation on the way higher education can be redesigned by assigning learners a more active role in learning and the engagement that occured during their learning experiences

Utilizing students' feedback to ensure quality in teaching and learning: A lesson from covid-19

In this article we investigate the impact of COVID-19 on teaching quality and student active teaching. The data used for the analysis is from more than 4,000 students at the University of Stavanger, collected for the Study Barometer, one of the most important metrics for assessing student satisfaction in higher education, in the period 2018-2020. Special attention is given to the teaching quality index and the active student participation in teaching index. Comparisons of the data from 2020 with the data given in the period 2018-2019 show few significant differences. For the Faculty of Health Sciences, however, there are strong significant differences for both the teaching quality index and the student active participation in teaching index. We reflect upon and discuss factors that may have contributed to these differences and show how a large-scale survey can identify drawbacks in teaching and learning in higher education.publishedVersio

The effects of task type on group work interaction : a study of Thai EFL learners

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Applying Critical Discourse Analysis as a conceptual framework for investigating gender stereotypes in political media discourse

This paper aims to demonstrate how Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can be used as a conceptual framework for investigating gender stereotypes in political media discourse. Language and gender studies in media discourse work with a diverse theoretical standpoint underpinning each particular work, and are generally bound by a concern for the reproduction of ideology in language use, which is also one of the aims of CDA. However, CDA has previously been criticized for selecting and using only a small number of texts, leading to concerns of representativeness of the texts selected, and thus susceptibility to the researcher's bias in text selection for an intended analysis. In this paper, we used news reports with reference to the former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra of Thailand as the case study to examine how gender stereotypes related to female politicians are linguistically generated in media text. We demonstrate how an abstract concept such as stereotyping can be investigated through systematic linguistic analysis and how such criticisms, especially that of representativeness of the texts selected, or cherry-picking data, can be addressed when conducting a CDA research project. We propose that the potential bias in data selection can be minimized or even eliminated by systematically obtaining a data set large enough to be a representative sample. Doing so can help increase the ability to describe texts, and more thoroughly convince the reader of the resulting claims regarding how gender stereotypes in politics are reproduced and generated through language used in media

Pre-service Teachers' Digital Experiences through Digital Pedagogical Practices in Norway

Digital skills are one of the key competences outlined in The European Reference Framework of Key Competences for Lifelong Learning prescribed by the EU in 2006. Integration of digital tools and resources into the classroom results in more platforms for teaching and learning activities. Teacher training programmes prepare pre-service teachers with pedagogical competencies and skills necessary for their future practices. This paper shows that pre-service teachers could overcome the pedagogical challenges during COVID-19 teaching by updating their present and future classroom teaching strategies around digital literacy. To explore further how these new teaching circumstances are understood and reflected on by pre-service teachers, the researchers collected written reflections of 52 pre-service teachers in Norway using an open-ended survey about their digital integration experiences in their practicum. This paper offers analyses of the reflections inductively to reveal the teachers’ process of development of their classroom teaching strategies as influenced by new digitalisation-related experiences. The findings show low levels of digital integration according to the SAMR model but moderate to high levels of satisfaction among pre-service teachers of digital practices. In the light of these findings, this study offers pedagogical technological implications for teachers and teacher educators who work with teacher education curricula