Search results for "Foreign language"
showing 10 items of 414 documents
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…
Discursive construction of a high-stakes test: the many faces of a test-taker
2006
As part of a larger project, we studied how a foreign language test got discursively constructed in the talk of upper-secondary-school leavers. A group of students were asked to keep an oral diary to record their ideas, feelings and experiences of preparing for and taking the test over the last spring term of school, as part of a high-stakes national examination. In addition, they took part in discussions either in pairs or groups of three after having learned about the final test results. After transcribing the data, drawing on a form of discourse analysis originally launched by a group of social psychologists, we identified (at least) four interpretative repertoires in the students’ acco…
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 …
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…
Ukrainian culture fansubbed: Challenges of amateur subtitling
2021
The research addresses the issues of rendering culture specific information in amateur subtitling from the Ukrainian into the English language. The fansubbing of proper names, culture-bound common nouns, formulaic sequences, sociolects and songs by the non-professional translators for whom English is a foreign language is the main focus of this study. Thus, the comparative analysis of the Ukrainian filmsChasing Two Hares(1961),Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors(1965) andPrayer for Hetman Mazepa(2001), and their English subtitles reveals the difficulties fansubbers may face, as well as discusses translations strategies and techniques employed. Moreover, the study delves into reasons underlying t…
Dealing with Culture in Schools: A Small-Step Approach Towards Anti-racism in Finland
2017
This chapter discusses anti-racism education by focusing on how culture is used in educational discourses in Finland. More and more studies highlight the pervasive use of culture as a substitute for race, urging scholars to explore how and why cultural claims are made relevant (Breidenbach and Nyiri 2009; Piller 2011). Culture is present in numerous subjects (e.g. religion, literature, history, languages) and anti-racism education should therefore be understood from a holistic perspective. This chapter focuses on the Finnish context which is relevant to examine for two main reasons. First, Finnish school system is globally represented as high quality. Second, the new national curriculum, wh…
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FOREIGN LANGUAGE ENJOYMENT AND GENDER AMONG SECONDARY GRAMMAR SCHOOL STUDENTS
2018
In the context of second language acquisition, foreign language enjoyment (FLE) is a relatively new concept. For that reason, none of the few research carried out in the field thus far has been focused on whether gender might be an important determinant of either a high or a low level of FLE. Thus, the purpose of the present paper was to examine the influence of FLE on learning English as a foreign language, as well as to investigate this relationship from the perspective of gender. The results of this study revealed that there are no statistically significant differences between males and females in FLE, while such differences are found in terms of the sources of FLE each gender perceives …
Polish Adolescents’ Perceptions of English and Their Desire to Learn It
2016
In the process of foreign language learning the way in which students perceive the language may have a strong facilitative impact on their language acquisition process, especially when this perception is positive (Despagne, 2010). Unfortunately, it has not yet been clearly established whether the relationship between perceptions and foreign language achievement can be explained by the moderating power of the student’s desire to learn the foreign language. For the purpose of this paper it is hypothesized that the learner’s perception of the foreign language is strongly related to the desire to learn it, leading to higher achievement in cases of positive perception. In order to corroborate th…
‘We are more than EFL teachers – we are educators’: emancipating EFL student-teachers through photovoice
2016
AbstractThe prevailing pedagogical orientations of English as a foreign language (EFL) education in Spain oppress learners intellectually in ways that are counterproductive to their learning. As a reaction to this, 129 EFL student-teachers (STs) took part during the 2013/14, 2014/15, and 2015/16 academic years in a workshop which drew on the methodology of participatory action research and on photovoice as a data-creating strategy, in order to emancipate these STs intellectually, boost their EFL development, and offer an alternative critical model for their future EFL teaching. The research was assessed collectively through a variety of qualitative strategies. Results showed that the photov…