Search results for " Method."
showing 10 items of 10241 documents
Metaphors in the mirror: The influence of teaching metaphors in a medical education programme
2016
Medical students often face problems in using and understanding metaphors when communicating with a patient or reading a scientific paper. These figures of speech constitute an interpretative problem and students need key strategies to facilitate metaphor comprehension and disambiguation of meaning. This article examines how medical students' strategies of metaphor comprehension could be improved by specific teaching on metaphors using a Cognitive Linguistics approach. Medical students' ability to comprehend mirror neuron metaphors was assessed comparing the performance of students who did not receive any instruction about metaphoric extension strategies after a lesson on mirror neurons wit…
Teaching English as a Non-Imperial Language in an Underprivileged Public School in Spain
2018
This article summarizes the processes and findings of a 2-year collaborative action research (CAR) project that analyzed and aimed to counteract some of the most negative educational effects of English linguistic imperialism in the field of English language teaching (ELT) and, more concretely, in the context of English as a foreign language education in Spain. The CAR investigated the ramifications of this phenomenon in a primary school located in one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city of València. The pedagogical alternative it embraced in order to reverse the underlying tenets of ELT under present-day neoliberal imperialism consisted in combining art and multimodality thr…
Words and images of multilingualism: A case study of two North Korean refugees
2018
Abstract The article analyses the experience of multilingualism in the South Korean context, focusing on the experiences of North Korean refugees. The research participants (N=2) are originally from North Korea, but now live in South Korea, where they face challenges in their adaptation to the new society, its linguistic landscape and its practices and positions with regard to language issues in society and in education. By combining verbal and visual means of data collection, we aim to analyse the multilingual trajectory of the research participants, their experiences of different languages and language learning and, further, the emotions that are attached to these. Our approach is socio-c…
Knowledge ecology for conceptual growth:Teachers as active agents in developing a PluriLiteracies approach to Teaching for Learning (PTL)
2017
This article explores how a group of educators and researchers enacted an inclusive process of conceptual growth involving teachers and teacher educators as active agents, knowledge builders and meaning-makers in the development of a Pluriliteracies approach to Teaching for Learning (PTL). The evolution of a working model based on five emergent principles, foregrounded the need for stakeholders across different languages, cultures and disciplines, to work together from the start so that learning spaces were created where teacher development went alongside researcher development, and theorizing was not only inclusive of praxis but validated by it. A growth cycle emerged using theories of pra…
Viewing CLIL through the eyes of former pupils : Insights into foreign language and intercultural attitudes
2018
This article examines the long-term effects of CLIL on former pupils’ foreign language and intercultural attitudes. The 24 participants, who received English-medium CLIL for nine years in the 1990s, were interviewed and the data analyzed using thematic analysis. The participants generally felt that CLIL had had a very positive effect on their target language attitudes. However, many considered that CLIL had affected negatively on their attitudes towards other foreign languages. The perceptions regarding the effect of CLIL on intercultural attitudes diverged more. The study elucidates the long-standing impact CLIL can have on individuals’ attitudes yielding insights into future CLIL educatio…
English pronunciation teaching at different educational levels: Insights into teachers’ perceptions and actions
2016
The aim of the present paper is to reflect upon the place of pronunciation in English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching at different educational levels in Poland. To collect the data, an on-line survey was conducted among EFL professionals teaching at primary, lower secondary, and higher secondary schools in Poland. The questions focused on the respondents’ beliefs about pronunciation, teachers’ competences regarding pronunciation and pronunciation teaching, and the pronunciation teaching techniques they use. The results depict the most and least frequently used pronunciation teaching techniques at each of the three educational stages, and the beliefs of EFL teachers in Poland regarding …
Progress Checking for Dummies
2018
Verification of progress properties is both conceptually and technically significantly more difficult than verification of safety and deadlock properties. In this study we focus on the conceptual side. We make a simple modification to a well-known model to demonstrate that it passes progress verification although the resulting model is intuitively badly incorrect. Then we point out that the error can be caught easily by adding a termination branch to the system. We compare the use of termination branches to the established method of addressing the same need, that is, weak fairness. Then we discuss another problem that may cause failure of catching progress errors even with weak fairness. Fi…
Teaching in the age of accountability: restrained by school culture?
2015
AbstractIn this paper, we explore how ‘teaching communication’ in the classroom is connected to school culture. In the age of accountability, the outcome focus force to the forefront, a ‘blame game’ which either blames students’ achievements on the teachers and teacher education, or the students and their socio-economic background. We argue that to succeed with teaching and learning is dependent on the school culture more than the single teacher or the students’ backgrounds. School culture is understood as attitudes, communication, student focus and engagement. Teaching communication in this paper is studied as teachers’ and students’ talk about subject matter in whole-class teaching. We ex…
Researching pronunciation learning strategies: An overview and a critical look
2018
Disparate goals that learners might have in learning second or foreign language pronunciation and the scant classroom time that can be dedicated to teaching this target language subsystem dictate that learner autonomy is of vital importance in this case and adept use of pronunciation learning strategies (PLS) can be viewed as key to the development of this attribute. Surprisingly, research on these strategies is scarce, mainly focusing on the identification and classification of PLS, diverse instruments are used for data collection and the findings are inconclusive. The paper provides an overview of the available research on PLS with respect to their identification, learners’ preferences co…
Formulating 'principles of procedure' for the foreign language classroom: A framework for process model language curricula
2015
This article aims to apply Stenhouse's process model of curriculum to foreign language (FL) education, a model which is characterized by enacting principles of procedure which are specific to the discipline which the school subject belongs to. Rather than to replace or dissolve current approaches to FL teaching and curriculum development, this article seeks to improve and enrich communicative and task-based orientations with an additional criterion for assessing the educational worth of the tasks through which these orientations are developed. Unlike the objectives and competences models, principles of procedure provide an intrinsic justification of school curriculum by enacting the epistem…