0000000000136855
AUTHOR
Riina Seppälä
showing 3 related works from this author
Learner agency within the design of an EAP course
2015
To meet the demands of today’s society and working life, higher education should support the development of learner agency. How the agency of individual learners emerges in university courses and what kind of agency empowers the learners to face new challenges should be considered. In this article, the focus is on learner agency enabled and expressed on a higher education language course. One learner’s experiences of a blended English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course are explored and used to examine the design of the course. The data reveal that the learner’s views of language-use categories and of herself as a language user emerged as central parts of her agency. Although the learner was…
Beyond the “student” position: Pursuing agency by drawing on learners’ life-worlds on an EAP course
2018
AbstractIn today’s world, individuals should be able to maintain their expertise amidst constant changes. Thus, this type of agency should be supported in higher education. One approach for a teacher-researcher to examine supporting agency and how it manifests itself in higher education courses is through the learning design. In this article, learning design is defined as the planned course path and the way in which that path is enacted in the course in a real-life setting. Thus, the learning design of a blended EAP course is examined, with a focus on the course assignments in two different groups in two consecutive years. Different types of agency were assumed through the tasks and those t…
Teacher-researchers Exploring Design-based Research to Develop Learning Designs in Higher Education Language Teaching
2012
Due to constant changes and developments of the 21st century societies and working life, the environments in which learning takes place have changed. Novel ways to research learning in those environments and to explore how learning could be supported with the learning design are needed in order to bring about changes in teaching practices. One of those ways could be design-based research (DBR), an iterative, interventionist and flexible research strategy, which would allow cycles of developing theory of learning as well as implementing design principles in practice. This article describes how we, as teacher-researchers, have adopted a design-based research approach in two separate studies i…