Search results for "TEAC"
showing 10 items of 3029 documents
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 …
Development of Professional Identity During Teacher's Practice
2016
Abstract The article focuses on issues of the development of professional identity of English teachers-to-be in Latvia. This development is an ongoing process which starts during teacher education. The article aims to examine emerging professional identity and how reflective self-evaluation during teacher's practice done with the help of reflective activities facilitates professional development of student teachers. Specific attention is paid to the self-reflection on teacher's practice experiences done with the help of the EPOSTL. It is also concerned with the ways how university can improve student's awareness of their identity. The conducted case study involved questionnaire, content ana…
The exclusive language of science? Comparing knowledge gains and motivation in English-bilingual biology lessons between non-selected and preselected…
2018
ABSTRACTThe dominant role of English as the global language of science entails a requirement for science teachers to equip their non-native English-speaking students with receptive and productive l...
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…
Teachers’ Emotions and Beliefs in Second Language Teaching : Implications for Teacher Education
2018
Studies on language teacher beliefs have long indicated that in order to better understand teacher beliefs, we need to look at their connections with emotions (Borg 2006). Researchers in fields such as social psychology (Frijda et al. 2000) and education (Rosiek 2003; Gill and Hardin 2014) have pointed out how emotions shape and are shaped by beliefs. These suggest also that emotions and beliefs are fundamentally interconnected in individuals’ decision-making processes, with emotions providing the necessary impetus for change and beliefs deciding the course of actions. In order to have a complete view of second language teachers’ beliefs, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of these…
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…
Stop the Deficit: Preparing Pre-service Teachers to Work with Bilingual Students in the United States
2018
This chapter explores the education of bilingual students from an American teacher education perspective. Bilingual students in the United States are often diminished to their student status of “English Language Learner” (ELL). Not only does this ELL designation assume a onesize-fits-all approach to education for and understanding of bilingual children, but the label itself implores a deficit perspective which neither captures nor values bilingual children in the United States. Driven by the goal to model and introduce assets-based pedagogies to our pre-service English as Second Language (ESL) teachers, the main question guiding our work was, as teacher educators, how can we challenge pre-s…
Two languages in the air: a cross-cultural comparison of preschool teachers’ reflections on their flexible bilingual practices
2020
This book article was originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. doi:10.1080/13670050.2016.1184615 Bilingual preschool education is under researched compared with bilingual school education. There is also a lack of research on bilingual preschool teachers’ agency and how they negotiate between two languages in the classroom. We examined the language practices of five bilingual preschool teachers working within three different socio-linguistic settings, in Finland (Finnish-Swedish and Russian-Finnish contexts), and Israel (an Arabic-Hebrew context) and interviewed the teachers about their use of languages in the classroom. We fou…
Teachers’ perspectives on telecollaboration in secondary school foreign language education
2018
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…