0000000000410246
AUTHOR
Begoña Clavel-arroitia
Analysing Lexical Density and Lexical Diversity in University Students’ Written Discourse
Abstract This study analyses both lexical density and lexical diversity in the written production of two groups of first year students at the Universitat de Valencia at the beginning and end of one-semester teaching period. These results were compared with those obtained by a third group of students aiming at level C2. Lexical density was tested using Textalyser ( http://textalyser.net ) and lexical frequency used the software RANGE (Nation and Heatly, 1994). Our results prove that the students from both groups at level B1 show the same progression between writing tasks 1 and 3. Furthermore, we can claim that it is possible to obtain a reliable measure of lexical richness which is stable ac…
Facework and Prosocial Teasing in a Synchronous Video Communication Exchange
This study centres on the analysis of prosocial teasing during a videoconference (telecollaboration) exchange between mixed-gender adolescent secondary school students from Spain and Germany. We contend that the provocative elements present in prosocial teasing activate a play frame, in Gregory Bateson’s terms, in which seemingly hostile face acts can be interpreted as playful behaviour. We argue that successful teasing can ultimately enhance the face of the teaser and that of the person being teased and thus build up rapport between them. Our analysis of the facework in the interaction during this telecollaboration exchange is based on Erwin Goffman’s notions of face, demeanour and deferen…
Telecollaboration in a secondary school context: Negotiation of meaning in English as a lingua franca/Spanish tandem interactions
En este artículo presentamos nuestra investigación sobre la negociación de significado en dos interacciones con los mismos estudiantes españoles y alemanes de 16 años de edad en colegios de España y Alemania respectivamente. Las interacciones incluyen dos constelaciones de idioma, es decir, inglés como lengua franca y un tándem español. Nuestra investigación se llevó a cabo dentro del proyecto Telecollaboration for Intercultural Language Acquisition project (TILA). Nuestro análisis cualitativo de la interacción demuestra que la telecolaboración ofrece muchas oportunidades para la comprensión y el aprendizaje. No hemos encontrado pruebas concluyentes para apoyar la hipótesis de que la negoci…
Teachers’ perspectives on telecollaboration in secondary school foreign language education
In recent years, telecollaboration has proved to be a useful tool in the acquisition of foreign languages and intercultural communicative skills (Belz 2003b; Clavel-Arroitia, Pennock-Speck 2015a, 2015b; Hewitt, Brett 2007; O’Dowd 2007; Su et al., 2005). This paper focuses on how prepared secondary-school teachers believe they are in order to successfully implement telecollaboration in the classroom. To gather information on their views we carried out an online survey of 179 secondary school foreign language teachers and a series of focus group interviews in the context of a European project, TeCoLa. The advantage of the double- pronged approach to data collection, quantitative and qualitati…