Search results for "language"
showing 10 items of 16993 documents
“Enymärä”: Thoughts on the use of Finnish as the majority language in locally published EFL activity books
2017
It has been a long tradition in Finland to use locally published textbooks in primary foreign language education. The books have been designed for linguistically homogenous groups of students, which explains why Finnish, as the learners’ L1, is the instructive metalanguage chosen for the EFL activity books. However, the growing number of immigrant children in the Finnish educational system raises the question to what extent these activity books can serve the needs of linguistically more diverse groups of learners. The connection between the two languages is so strong that Finnish seems to serve as a precondition for the acquisition of English. The high proportion of tasks requiring fluency …
Early Oral Language Comprehension, Task Orientation, and Foundational Reading Skills as Predictors of Grade 3 Reading Comprehension
2016
The present five-year longitudinal study from preschool to grade 3 examined the developmental associations among oral language comprehension, task orientation, reading precursors, and reading fluency, as well as their role in predicting grade 3 reading comprehension. Ninety Finnish-speaking students participated in the study. The students’ oral language comprehension (vocabulary knowledge, listening comprehension, and inference making) and task orientation were assessed in preschool, kindergarten, and grade 3. Reading precursors (letter knowledge and phonological awareness) were assessed at the first two timepoints and reading fluency at the third timepoint. Structural equation modeling sho…
Let's talk business! : a task-based material package of public speaking and small talk in the BELF context
2012
Arvioiden mukaan lähivuosina yli kolmannes maailman ihmisistä käyttää englannin kieltä. Tämä on jo vuosia näkynyt ja tulee myös tulevaisuudessa yhä enemmän näkymään kansainvälisessä liike-elämässä, jossa englantia käytetään lingua francana. Eritoten englannin suullinen taito, kuten julkinen puhuminen ja small talk, näyttelevät suurta roolia tässä kontekstissa. Huomionarvoista on kuitenkin se, että hyvin usein liike-elämän kieli- ja viestintäkoulutuksen opetusmateriaalit epäonnistuvat valmistamaan kansainvälisen liike-elämän toimijoita tosielämän tilanteisiin. Tästä johtuen olen maisterintutkielmassani koonnut opetusmateriaalipaketin, jonka keskiössä on ensinnäkin tulevien liike-elämän toimi…
An Edutainment Implementation in an English Vocational Training Class
2021
Edutainment ha sido definido como la unión entre la educación y el entretenimiento, aspectos que todo profesor querría tener en sus clases. Sin embargo, todavía no hay una implementación suficiente del enfoque para afirmar de una forma clara si es útil utilizarlo en las clases de aprendizaje de segundas lenguas o lenguas extranjeras. Este estudio tiene la ambición de contribuir a la comunidad educativa con un caso que podría ser un punto de partida para futuras investigaciones. En este trabajo se describe una investigación que duró 2 semanas en dos grupos de alumnos de 1º de un curso superior de formación profesional, donde se implementó el Edutainment en el grupo experimental y se implemen…
CLIL Challenges : Secondary School CLIL Teachers’ Voices and Experienced Agency in Three European Contexts
2020
This qualitative interview study focuses on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) teacher agency in three European contexts, Austria, Finland and Andalusia, Spain. The aim of the study is to understand how individual CLIL teachers experience their agency when encountering challenges in their work and to demonstrate the multifaceted quality of their agency. The study employs the Listening Guide method (Gilligan, 2015) to listen to the voices of three secondary school subject teachers from three diverse contexts. The analysis shows that CLIL challenges both empowered and disempowered the teachers depending on how meaningful they found their work and what their possibilities to act w…
Teachers' effect on learners' willingness to communicate in L2
2014
Kielenopetuksen tutkimuksessa sekä pedagogiikassa on viime vuosina korostettu merkityksellistä viestintää, minkä johdosta myös oppijan halu viestiä vieraalla kielellä on noussut alan tutkimuksessa keskiöön. Kasvavasta kiinnostuksesta huolimatta on opettajan käytöksen ja opetusmenetelmien vaikutus oppilaiden kielenkäytön halukkuuteen toistaiseksi melko vähän tutkittu tekijä. Tästä syystä tämä tutkielma selvittää suomalaisten kielenoppijoiden käsityksiä siitä, kuinka opettajien käytös ja opetusmenetelmät vaikuttavat heidän valmiuteensa käyttää englantia opetustilanteessa. Lisäksi tutkimuksessa raportoidaan oppilaiden ajatuksia siitä, millä tavoin opettaja pystyy käytöksellään nostamaan oppila…
Addressing Complexity in Science|Environment|Health Pedagogy
2019
This paper aims to discuss complexity as a key feature for understanding the role of science knowledge in environmental and health contexts—a central issue in Science|Environment|Health pedagogy. Complex systems are, in principle, not predictable. In different contexts, ephemeral mechanisms produce different, sometimes completely unexpected results. The art of decision-making in complex contexts is to take scientific knowledge into account but to interpret its meaning in terms of concrete complex contexts. This is illustrated by four empirical studies on Science|Environment|Health issues, presented midway through this paper. The findings underscore the importance of introducing complexity i…
The Role of Social Support Systems in Adolescent Foreign Language Learning
2017
In adolescents the main groups of social support are their family, peers, and teachers with whom they intcract most frequently. They play a buffering role between stress and psychological well-being by helping to cope with adverse challenges, and by providing social integration. Conseąuently, it is believed that in the situation of stress caused by the necessity to learn a foreign language (FL) as a compulsory subject, social support can be viewed as an important factor that may positively influence learners’ academic achievement, exposing the role of the perccived availability of significant others’ help in achieving FL success. To date, in spite of the cali for research on the generał fun…
MOCSE Centered on Students: Validation of Learning Demands and Teacher Support Scales
2020
Based on The Educational Situation Quality Model (MOCSE, acronym in Spanish) framework, the primary objective of this study is to test the factorial validity and reliability of two MOCSE measure instruments referred to the preactional-decisional phase, specifically to learning demands and teacher supports perceived by students to overcome such demands in the classroom context. The participants were 357 Spanish undergraduate students. The data obtained by exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the “Learning Demands Scale” (MOCSE-LDS) has a two-factor structure: perceived desirability and feasibility of demands. The data also revealed that the “Teacher Support Questionnair…
Quality of educational dialogue and association with students’ academic performance
2018
The study used a mixed-methods approach to examine the associations between the quality of educational dialogue and students' academic performance and to analyse what kinds of dialogic teaching patterns of different levels of quality can be identified in classroom lessons. A total of 158 Grade 6 lessons were video-recorded, and the quality of the educational dialogue was assessed using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Secondary (CLASS-S) observational instrument. Multilevel modelling indicated that the quality of educational dialogue was positively associated with students’ academic performance (grades) in language arts and physics/chemistry. Qualitative analysis was subsequently use…