scholarly journals Can the teacher be taken out of the teaching? A pilot project on intensifying a course in English and its implications for results, motivation and workload

2009 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Martine Swennen
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
Classroom Teachers ◽  
Digital Learning ◽  
Exchange Students ◽  
Regular Form ◽  
Digital Learning Environment ◽  
Language Courses ◽  
Oral Skills ◽  
Regular Students

<p>The increasing number of master's degree courses taught in English has created a rising demand for English language courses at our university. These courses last one semester, which presents problems for exchange students, who sometimes arrive when the semester has already started, but also for regular students, who experience clashes in their schedules in the second quarter of the semester as most other courses are organized in a period of seven weeks. To cope with these problems we decided to change a 14 week-course into an intensive 7-week course with a prominent role for ICT. In the new course we decided to use the standard digital learning environment at our university (Blackboard) for instruction and a wiki for interaction and collaboration, with both tools taking over part of the teacher's role. We ran two pilot projects with a total of 19 students. The course was also offered in its regular form to a group of 15 students. After the course, all the students were asked to fill in a questionnaire in which we asked their opinion about the use of ICT and the general usefulness of the course. The questionnaire showed that the students liked using the wiki and Blackboard but some indicated that they would have liked more time to practise their oral skills. Students from the pilot group on average reported to have spent less time on the course than students from the regular course, although they still thought of the course as having a heavy workload. When it comes to teaching hours, contact time in the classroom was decreased to 14 hours, but outside the classroom teachers put in just as many hours marking work and communicating with students as they did in the regular course.</p>

scholarly journals Barriers to Speaking in English Among Maritime Students

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 5577-5584
Keyword(s):  
English Learners ◽  
English Language ◽  
Female Students ◽  
Contributing Factors ◽  
Tertiary Institutions ◽  
Speaking Proficiency ◽  
Language Courses ◽  
Oral Skills ◽  
Survey Questionnaires

This study analyses the contributing factors to problems with regard to speaking in English among maritime students at two tertiary institutions in Malaysia. This study looks at five paradigms: learners’ personality, amount and quality of exposure to English, learners’ attitude, learners’ motivation, and pedagogical management of the English Language courses at the campus. The study also compares the causes of the speaking problems in English between male and female students. Survey questionnaires are distributed to 150 final-year maritime students. Data were analysed descriptively via SPSS. It is found that the main causes of the students’ speaking problems stem from the teachers’ pedagogical management of the English subjects, exposure to English, and personality which contribute moderately to the learners’ predicaments. However, motivation and attitude are identified to have contributed the least to the students’ oral skills inadequacies. Several ensuing implications for initiatives to help enhance students’ speaking proficiency in the English Language are also discussed.

scholarly journals Learning with Friction—Students’ Gestures and Enactment in Relation to a GeoGebra Simulation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorena Solvang ◽  
Jesper Haglund
Keyword(s):  
Learning Environment ◽  
Video Data ◽  
Digital Learning ◽  
School Students ◽  
Representational Competence ◽  
Physics Students ◽  
Digital Learning Environment ◽  
Upper Secondary ◽  
Collaborative Learning Environment ◽  
Why Questions

AbstractThe present study contributes to the understanding of physics students’ representational competence by examining specific bodily practices (e.g. gestures, enactment) of students’ interaction and constructions of representations in relation to a digital learning environment. We present and analyse video data of upper-secondary school students’ interaction with a GeoGebra simulation of friction. Our analysis is based on the assumption that, in a collaborative learning environment, students use their bodies as means of dealing with interpretational problems, and that exploring students’ gestures and enactment can be used to analyse their sensemaking processes. This study shows that specific features of the simulation—features connected with microscopic aspects of friction—triggered students to ask what-if and why questions and consequently, to learn about the representation. During this sense-making process, students improvised their own representations to make their ideas more explicit. The findings extend current research on students’ representational competence by bringing attention to the role of students’ generation of improvised representations in the processes of learning with and about representations.

scholarly journals The Role of Learning Resource Centers at the Northern Border University in Increasing the Academic Achievement in English Language Courses

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
Yaser Mohammad Al Sawy
Keyword(s):  
Academic Achievement ◽  
English Language Learners ◽  
English Language ◽  
Strategic Resources ◽  
Northern Border ◽  
Language Courses ◽  
Language Students ◽  
Faculty Of Education ◽  
Constitutive Factor ◽  
The University

The study aims at understanding the relationship between the use of IT applications in the Learning Resources Centers (henceforth, LRCs) at the university and increasing the academic achievement of the English language students at the Faculty of Education and Literature at the Northern Border University? The researcher relied on the research methodology of the field study, which allowed him to collect the views of a random sample of the English language learners at the university to measure and analyze the effectiveness of the use of IT within the LRCs. The study showed that the IT within the LRCs is one of the most important strategic resources at the level of educational institutions and the main factor in the development of its sectors. There is an interest from the Northern Border University on upgrading and supporting the IT infrastructure, especially in education for it is the basis for community development. A high proportion of English Language students at the university are keen on using and applying many of the technological learning media within the LRCs as a constitutive factor in understanding mental processes such as visualization, thinking, learning and creativity which is the first step towards knowledge and innovation.

scholarly journals Mobile Educational SMSs as Supplementary Means to Teach Sentence Paraphrasing in EMP Course

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jafar Asgari Arani
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
English Language ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
Likert Scale ◽  
Conventional Group ◽  
English Sentence ◽  
Paired Samples ◽  
Post Test ◽  
English Syntax

Digital media has been used to enhance language learning for decades. Since the aim of language learning is to develop communicative proficiency, using communication devices and channels that already exist in the classroom is a sensible way of exploiting opportunities for language practice. The ‘anywhere, anytime’ accessibility to educational contents that mobile SMSs, sometimes freely, offer users, means that mobile learning can extend the opportunities for study outside of the classroom. Given the importance of writing, especially for academic purposes in university, the study set a dual goal: firstly, to analyze the outcome of applying supplementary SMS activity to teach English syntax necessary to paraphrase sentences and secondly, to clarify the medical students' ideas about it. A quasi-experimental, pre-test and post-test, research design was utilized to investigate the hypotheses of this study. Two groups (each 40-second year students of medicine) were randomly assigned to be the experimental and the conventional group. Both groups were taught the same syllabus materials designed for English for Medical Purposes (EMP) II course in a 17-week semester in Kashan University of Medical Sciences, Iran. The former received the SMS –based supplementary contents in a scheduled pattern of delivery two times a week to strengthen their learning while the latter only was taught in a face to face setting. An open questionnaire was used to examine students feedback towards their attitudes. The validity of the questionnaire was examined by giving to a number of professors of English language. The data were also collected and analyzed through an Attitude/ Motivation questionnaire consisting of 12 Likert-scale items, pretest& posttest, paired-samples t-tests, and one way ANOWA. The pretest and posttest data paired t-test likert-scale items analyzed results showed that differences between the experimental and control groups were statistically significant. It was found that the effect of practicing SMS on the students' English syntax learning was positive. According to the findings, students receiving the supplementary English syntax SMSs noticeably improved their sentence paraphrasing performance and acquired higher grades during the post-test than those in conventional group. Qualitative data from interviews and questionnaires indicate that students hold positive attitudes towards receiving paraphrase syntactic points via SMS. Majority of students in this pilot project considered the educational program offered to be efficient, useful and beneficial. The data gathered revealed mobile syntactic supplementary SMSs can be integrated into EMP II course to enable students to develop better English sentence paraphrasing skills. Mobile SMS; Sentence Paraphrasing; Educational Tool; English for Medical Purposes

scholarly journals Exploring the Writing Challenges Faced by M.Phil. and Ph.D. Scholars: A Case

2021 ◽  
Vol VI (IV) ◽  
pp. 34-41
Author(s):  
Hina Iqbal ◽  
Muhammad Saeed
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Language ◽  
Qualitative Case Study ◽  
Sampling Technique ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Interactive Programming ◽  
Report Quality ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Language Courses

Academic writing plays a pivotal role in developing research proposals. The present study aimed to explore the grammatical errors that M.Phil/PhDs scholars commit in academic writing. The present study employed a qualitative case study designed to explore the challenges in the English language faced by the M.Phil and PhDs scholars. The 20 Ph.D. and 36 M.Phil scholars were selected by busing purposive sampling technique. Data were collected by using two self-developed semi-structured interviews protocol. Thematic analysis approach was employed for data analysis. The findings revealed that all the participants reported that correct use of tenses was a big hurdle that entailed the other grammatical mistakes and reduced the report quality because all the lexical aspects are linked with these mechanics. The study recommended that English language courses be offered to postgraduate, M. Phil and Ph.D. scholars to learn the technical aspects of the language and provide students with online interactive programming.

scholarly journals Raising awareness on assessment criteria through peer-assessment and self-reflection in the Spanish oral class

2020 ◽  
pp. 79-88
Author(s):  
Alba Del Pozo García
Keyword(s):  
Learning Styles ◽  
Peer Assessment ◽  
Evaluation Criteria ◽  
Oral Exam ◽  
Oral Performance ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Raising Awareness ◽  
Language Courses ◽  
The University ◽  
Oral Skills

In language courses, oral skills are frequently a source of anxiety for students. Moreover, in some occasions, students are unfamiliar with the evaluation criteria used to assess their performances, increasing their level of stress when facing the oral exam. This article describes a series of activities based on the introduction of several formative and summative self- and peer-assessment activities in a Year 2 Spanish module, aimed at students in the Modern Languages Programme at the University of Nottingham. Students have varied profiles and learning styles, as their programmes include Modern Languages and some variations of Joint Honours programmes with languages. The activities aimed to give students some extra tools to allow them to better monitor their oral performance, potentially easing their concern on the linguistic elements which would be assessed and letting them autonomously identify their own strengths and the areas where they might need improvement.

scholarly journals SETTING UP A DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT IN A PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (34) ◽  
pp. 624
Author(s):  
Vladimir N. Ivanov ◽  
Ekaterina A. Ilyina ◽  
Alexander A. Kirillov ◽  
Galina A. Alexandrova ◽  
Nikolay I. Stepanov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Learning Environment ◽  
Digital Learning ◽  
Digital Learning Environment

Este artigo tem como objetivo descobrir as particularidades de desenvolvimento do sistema de gerenciamento de universidades digitais da Rússia na Rússia no contexto da digitalização universal e identificar as oportunidades para o desenvolvimento de elementos do ambiente de aprendizado digital das universidades. O principal método de pesquisa da questão é uma análise comparativa do nível de competências digitais de estudantes de educação profissional na Rússia e nos estados membros da União Europeia. Os autores do artigo descobriram as particularidades dos processos transformacionais da educação moderna, revelaram o papel principal do desenvolvimento das tecnologias da informação e da comunicação, determinaram o lugar da Rússia no espaço de aprendizado mundial e analisaram a dinâmica da posição das instituições de ensino superior russas no país. a classificação mundial da universidade.

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