Search results for "education"
showing 10 items of 26766 documents
Flipping and Blending : An Action Research Project on Improving a Functional Programming Course
2016
This article reports on an action research project on improving a functional programming course by moving towards a practical and flexible study environment—flipped and blended classroom. Teaching the topic of functional programming was found to be troublesome using a traditional lectured course format. The need to increase students’ amount of practice emerged, while subsequently challenges relating to students’ independent practical coursework were observed. Particular concerns relating to group work, learning materials, and the attribute of flexibility were investigated during the third action research cycle. The research cycle was analyzed using a qualitative survey on students’ views, t…
The Art-Based Methods in Developing Transversal Competence
2019
This article describes a project called “The art based methods in developing transversal competence” funded by The Finnish National Board of Education. The article is based on the hermeneutic phenomenological approach in action research. The project developed learning environments as well as project-based learning with emphasis on the art-based methods and transversal competence approach to learning. The aim was to develop unique and communal well-being in learning. The project offered tools to strengthen teachers’ professional skills to use expressive, art-based methods in different curriculum-based projects. The professional in-service training project included five contact days in six we…
Student teachers and their identity construction and awareness of multilingualism: re-visiting three studies
2019
[EN] This article re-visits three studies that originally focused on beliefs about second language (L2) learning and teaching held by student teachers. The studies have been conducted in the same educational context (that is, at a Finnish university). The participants in the studies are majors or minors in English, Swedish, German, etc., and they range from first-year students to fifth-year students about to graduate as qualified L2 teachers. Data have been collected by a variety of means over the past few years (questionnaires, sentence-completion tasks, drawings), and partly longitudinally. The pools of data (verbal and visual) will be re-analysed from the perspective of identity construc…
Second language comprehensibility and accentedness across oral proficiency levels : A comparison of two L1s
2021
Second language comprehensibility and accentedness are highly complex phenomena, and numerous studies have been conducted to better understand these constructs. However, research has seldom addressed L2 comprehensibility and accentedness in relation to speakers' proficiency in the target language. This study explores L2 English comprehensibility and accentedness across three proficiency levels. The speakers were 60 teenaged Finns, half of them speaking Finnish as their L1 and half speaking Finland-Swedish as their L1. Using 20-s speech samples, the comprehensibility and accentedness of the speakers were rated by 34 English-speaking teenagers on a 9-point scale. Comparisons were made regardi…
To correct or to cooperate : Mediational processes and L2 development
2018
The present article argues for a conceptual distinction between corrective feedback and mediation that emphasizes the status of the latter not as an instructional practice but as a defining feature of human psychology (Vygotsky, 1987) that has direct implications for how instruction might be approached. Specifically, Sociocultural Theory (SCT) posits that humans are always and everywhere mediated, as individuals draw upon meanings and ways of thinking they have already internalized as well as those that are available in their immediate environment to regulate their actions. With regard to second language (L2) education, rather than exclusively focusing on learner independent performance or…
Kazoo training for L2 pronunciation practice and reduced foreign accentedness?
2019
This paper presents a controlled pretest–training–posttest study on using a small membraphone instrument called kazoo for L2 pronunciation practice and reducing foreign accentedness. Learners were recorded for free speech before and after a six-week pronunciation and oral skills course including L2 prosody training with personal kazoos. A control group did not receive any kazoo training but did similar tasks in regular speech. Samples of all learners’ free speech before and after the course were rated for foreign accentedness by L1 speakers. In addition, learners taking part in the kazoo group were interviewed in focus groups to ascertain their views on kazoo training. The results imply tha…
Connecting the Language Classroom and the Wild : Re-enactments of Language Use Experiences
2018
AbstractUsing multimodal conversation analysis, this article analyses language learning as an in situ process during a teacher-assigned, experientially based pedagogical activity. The activity involved a three-part pedagogical structure, where learners first prepared for and then participated in real-life service encounters, and later reflected on their experiences back in the classroom. The analysis details how the co-constructed telling sequences through which novice second language users re-enact their experiences create an occasion for language-focused activity. We argue that the actions through which the participants display and sustain an orientation to an interactional practice as an…
Second Language Prosody and its Development : Connection between Different Aspects
2018
This study focuses on the development of L2 prosody and, in particular, whether different aspects can affect each other. Finnish-speaking learners of Swedish took part in a pronunciation and oral skills course and were recorded for various speaking tasks before and after the experimental intervention. Read-aloud declarative sentences (statements) from nine learners were acoustically analysed for several tonal and temporal aspects, focusing on the marking of primary stress. The results reveal that the learning of Swedish tonal word accent 2 (H*LH) facilitates other tonal developments towards native-like utterance intonation. A link between tonal and temporal developments in the marking of pr…
Words, clauses, sentences, and T-units in learner language: Precise and objective units of measure?
2020
In research on learner language complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF), syntactic complexity is often studied with quantitative measures based on words, clauses, sentences, and T-units. The findings have been mixed, but segmenting learner language into these units of measure has seldom been problematised, even if the need for accurate coding is well known. The present study explores words, clauses, sentences, and T-units as production units in written learner language using a corpus of 352 L2 Finnish texts (28,813 words). The results illustrate how written learner language can be hard to fit into the production unit categories, which are essential for the most frequently used quantitative m…
Guiding and assessing development of L2 writing process : the role of peer collaboration
2022
This study, informed by Vygotskian notion of mediation and reporting on a partnership between a researcher (the first author) and a teacher (the second author), aims at exploring how peers’ comments can inform teacher assessment and guidance of learners’ L2 (second/foreign language) writing. The participants were 19 L2 English learners in an upper secondary school in Finland. We largely focus on the notes that one pair of learners made on each other’s essays and how they responded to peer assistance. Triangulating these data with classroom observation and a questionnaire, we traced how learners co-constructed their understanding of how their texts can be developed. The foci and how the iden…