Search results for "method."
showing 10 items of 13043 documents
Beyond the “student” position: Pursuing agency by drawing on learners’ life-worlds on an EAP course
2018
AbstractIn today’s world, individuals should be able to maintain their expertise amidst constant changes. Thus, this type of agency should be supported in higher education. One approach for a teacher-researcher to examine supporting agency and how it manifests itself in higher education courses is through the learning design. In this article, learning design is defined as the planned course path and the way in which that path is enacted in the course in a real-life setting. Thus, the learning design of a blended EAP course is examined, with a focus on the course assignments in two different groups in two consecutive years. Different types of agency were assumed through the tasks and those t…
Training the modern translator – the acquisition of digital competencies through blended learning
2019
This paper presents the ERASMUS+ DigiLing project, which aims to teach and improve linguists’ and translators’ skills and knowledge of digitalisation to prepare them for today’s job market. Against this background, it discusses the development of digital competencies and distinguishes them from traditional domain-specific and general competencies. For the purpose of competence acquisition, six online courses have been created which all revolve around the field of ‘digital linguistics’, including localization in the digital age and post-editing machine translation. We provide an overview of the project, the course contents and the didactic methodology. In addition, we discuss which competenc…
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 …
Readability and the Web
2012
Readability indices measure how easy or difficult it is to read and comprehend a text. In this paper we look at the relation between readability indices and web documents from two different perspectives. On the one hand we analyse how to reliably measure the readability of web documents by applying content extraction techniques and incorporating a bias correction. On the other hand we investigate how web based corpus statistics can be used to measure readability in a novel and language independent way.
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…