Citizenship education: A media literacy course taught in Japanese university

2021 ◽  
pp. 204717342110614
Author(s):  
Van Thanh Nguyen

This case study documents the effort to prototype a media literacy curriculum based on Herman and Chomsky (2010)'s Propaganda Model as well as the target students’ environment and need analysis. The course is implemented under a Content and Language Integrated Learning program for 30 first-year undergraduate students in Sophia University, Japan. The objective is to develop students’ awareness of issues facing society they live in, along with the capacity to think critically about media information, deliberate in public discourse via expression of individual opinions, and exchange with others. Evaluation study is conducted upon completion of the course to examine whether, or to what extent, that objective is realized, using qualitative method. Results show positive impacts on students’ learning, providing valuable inputs for further iterations of curriculum design in citizenship and media literacy education.

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 116-142
Author(s):  
Steve Marshall ◽  
Mingming Zhou ◽  
Ted Gervan ◽  
Sunita Wiebe

In this article, we analyze a broad range of factors that affect the sense of belonging of undergraduate students taking a first-year academic literacy course (ALC) at a multicultural, multilingual university in Vancouver, Canada. Students who fail to meet the university’s language and literacy requirements are required to pass ALC before they can enrol in writing courses across the disciplines. Consequently, many of those students feel that they have yet to be accepted as fully legitimate members of the university community. We present data from a two-year, mixed-method study, which involved asking students in surveys and interviews about their sense of belonging, as well as analyzing their reflective writing samples for issues related to their sense of belonging. We found that the participants’ perceptions of sense of belonging are multilayered and context-dependent, relating to changes in time and space, classroom pedagogy, and other social, cultural, and linguistic factors. Implications for higher education are discussed.  


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Peet van Aardt

As part of the first year Academic Literacy course at the UFS, students are required to study graded readers. The booklets are abridged versions of Western fiction, therefore these narratives reinforce the colonial presence in our curriculum. But South African students need to read local narratives in order to learn about each other – from each other. By taking part in the Initiative for Creative African Narratives (iCAN) students improve our curriculum by writing their own short stories so that they become contributors of material that will be graded and tested to form part of the UFS Academic Literacy curriculum. Thereby, students contribute to larger bodies of knowledge through their lived experiences. This paper reflects on the challenges and opportunities within the iCAN process.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Linden

The Charles Sturt University Retention Team has developed, tested, evaluated, and refined a retention model through 14 action-research cycles from 2017-2021. The project has expanded from a small pilot in one faculty to monitoring the engagement and submission of an early assessment item for over 70% of all commencing undergraduate students across the University. The Retention Model synergistically overlays curriculum design and student support and ensures academics embed best practice transition pedagogy and learning engagement activities into key first-year subjects. By monitoring the submission of early assessment items, the team can accurately identify and proactively contact students who are not engaged in their studies prior to their first census date. Every aspect of this program supports equity student groups that are over-represented at our regional university. This work has significantly improved commencing progress rates across the institution.


LEKSIKA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Fithriyah Rahmawati

The discussion in line with students’ beliefs about language learning is still popular nowadays since it is believed that the student’s beliefs may influence the language learning process, such as motivation, learning style, and strategies, etc. which later ultimately affected the success of language learning. This study was conducted to investigate how students of the English program at IAIN Madura (State Islamic Institute of Madura), Indonesia, express their beliefs about English language learning. This study was implemented in terms of survey study in which the data was primarily gathered by administering the questionnaire entitled Beliefs About Language learning Inventory (BALLI) of Horwitz’s (1987). The questionnaires were administered to students of English teaching and learning program through Google form. About 144 undergraduate students in the first year have participated in this study.  The finding revealed the students’ beliefs in terms of percentage of agreements in all area of BALLI, namely language aptitude, the strategy of learning and communication, the nature of learning language, motivation and expectation in learning, and the difficulty faced by students


2020 ◽  
Vol 116 ◽  
pp. 26-36
Author(s):  
Shane A. McCoy

Conceptualized as writing for justice, I offer close-scrutiny and analyses of teaching artifacts that animate my course syllabi in order to understand how first-year composition (FYC) courses might function as a vehicle for advancing social justice. Specifically, this essay offers a framework for enabling students with the critical capacities to transfer social justice knowledge from the classroom to the street. With close readings of my curricula and borrowing from the scholarship on knowledge transfer studies (Bawarshi & Reiff 2011; Beaufort 2007; Yancey 2011), I bridge the theoretical framework of writing for justice to a practice of writing for justice in curriculum design and development. As I argue here, this aspect of the curriculum provides the framework for crafting a FYC curriculum that aims to transform undergraduate students’ cognitive schemas by forming new “impressions” (Ahmed 2004) of social justice.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824402110684
Author(s):  
Chin-Ting Liu ◽  
Yuan-shan Chen

As a first step toward understanding the relationship between conscious awareness of linguistic knowledge and translation performance, this study investigated whether enhancement of trainee translators’ awareness of linguistic ambiguity helped them increase their awareness of ambiguity in translation and whether the effects were correlated with the participants’ language proficiency. Forty-six first-year undergraduate students from a translation program received a multiple-choice pretest, a 20-minute awareness-raising lecture focusing on linguistic ambiguity immediately after the pretest, and the same multiple-choice posttest a week later. The results indicated that the participants detected more items with linguistic ambiguity in translation after their awareness of linguistic ambiguity had been increased. However, the participants also judged a higher number of unambiguous sentences as ambiguous in the posttest. Additionally, the increases or decreases in participants’ scores in the posttest were not correlated with their English proficiency. The findings could be accounted for by Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis. The implications for the curriculum design of translation programs as well as directions for future studies are discussed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Beauty B. Ntereke ◽  
Boitumelo T. Ramoroka

The ability to read and interpret textbooks and other assigned material is a critical component of success at university level. Therefore, the aims of this study are twofold: to evaluate the reading levels of first-year students when they first enter the university to determine how adequately prepared they are for university reading. It is also to find out if there will be any significant improvement after going through the academic literacy course offered to first-year students. The participants were 51 first-year undergraduate humanities students enrolled in the Communication and Academic Literacy course at the University of Botswana. The data were collected through a reading test adopted from Zulu which was administered at the beginning of the first semester. The same test was administered at the end of the semester after the students had gone through the academic literacy course to see if there was any difference in performance. The findings of this study indicate that there is a mixed and wide variation of students reading competency levels when students first enter the university and that a significant number of first-year entrants are inadequately prepared for university reading.


Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Durba Chattaraj

In an increasingly interconnected world, learning how to think anthropologically — learning how to think with difference — should be an essential part of the process of higher education. Yet many students may never take an anthropology course during their undergraduate career. In such a milieu, it is important for anthropologists to both teach and actively participate in the curriculum design of the first-year writing seminars that are part of the core curriculum of many universities and colleges globally. While first-year writing programs predominate in the United States and the United Kingdom, they are growing internationally as well, particularly in liberal arts institutions. In this article I argue that anthropologists should teach first-year writing seminars at their educational institutions for three reasons: first, anthropology as a discipline is ecumenical about evidence; thus it introduces students to a wide range of evidentiary practices early on. This broad-based understanding of evidence facilitates transfer across disciplines. Second, encountering anthropology in a writing seminar attracts students towards pursuing majors, minors and elective classes in the discipline. Finally, through the discipline’s core methodology of participant observation, lived experience, rather than a synthesis of pre-existing texts, is the core source from which arguments and conclusions about the social world are derived. In an increasingly unequal world where representation in, and access to, written text is concomitantly unequal, it is important that students are introduced to multiple ways to understand and think about human experience. The methodology of participant observation destabilises slightly for undergraduate students the authority of written text as the main, and, often singular, source of knowledge.


2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Maksl ◽  
Stephanie Craft ◽  
Seth Ashley ◽  
Dean Miller

A survey of college students showed those who had taken a news literacy course had significantly higher levels of news media literacy, greater knowledge of current events, and higher motivation to consume news, compared with students who had not taken the course. The effect of taking the course did not diminish over time. Results validate the News Media Literacy Scale and suggest the course is effective in helping equip students to understand and interpret news.


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