E-Book, Englisch, Band 27, 356 Seiten
Perspectives for English Language Education
E-Book, Englisch, Band 27, 356 Seiten
Reihe: AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0478-4
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Carmen M. Amerstorfer is a researcher and foreign language teacher educator at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Max von Blanckenburg is postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Teaching English as a Foreign Language at the University of Munich, Germany.
Autoren/Hrsg.
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Strengthening the Involvement of Learners and Teachers in English Language Education
An Introduction to the Volume Max von Blanckenburg and Carmen M. Amerstorfer Ask a hundred people what they consider key aspects of good teaching, and you will most likely get quite a variety of responses. But many of us – whether you are a foreign language teacher, university student, teacher educator, researcher, or do not belong to any of these groups – can typically remember a lesson that somehow left a positive impression. As editors of this book, we would like to invite you to think back to a foreign language class that you experienced as enjoyable and purposeful. What was the lesson about and what made it meaningful to you? This volume aims to explore such questions and, in doing so, starts from the premise that stimulating lessons require a readiness on the sides of learners and teachers alike to get involved in the educational process. We thus chose “Activating and Engaging Learners and Teachers” as a leading theme to describe both a prerequisite and a goal of foreign language education. Managing to “get someone on board” arguably depends on individual, social, and systemic factors which are interdependent and influence how teachers design and conduct lessons and how learners experience and profit from them. The contributions in this book investigate these aspects from various angles to illustrate how activation and engagement relate to positive learning environments and relationships, texts and teaching materials that facilitate immersive as well as reflective learning experiences, approaches allowing for both individualised as well as social learning and engage students cognitively, socially, and emotionally, diagnostic measures for assessment and classroom research, and current concepts for engaging learners with cultural themes and spaces as well as with political issues. This volume commemorates the retirement of Werner Delanoy, who has been a cherished staff member at the Department of English at the University of Klagenfurt since 1984 and Professor of English Didactics since 2001. Werner has tremendously influenced both of our academic careers and those of many others as advisor, confidence booster, role model, and “critical friend,” as he likes to call himself. His work has been characterised by a deep interest and extensive research output in various areas, particularly in the fields of cultural and literary learning within English language education. Werner’s reflections – on concepts of culture in a globalised modernity, on the relevance of literary texts to promote educational processes, or on the notion of dialogue as a basic orientation in teaching and learning scenarios, to name but a few – have shaped and advanced English didactics in a substantial manner. Werner’s interest in the concept of dialogue likewise translates into his understanding of his various roles as researcher, lecturer, supervisor, or colleague, where he is consistent in meeting others in most respectful and appreciative ways. He will be greatly missed as a board member of the ÖGSD (Austrian society for the didactics of language teaching), which he cofounded in 2007. With his exceptional people skills and academic genius, he is a tough act to follow. Moreover, Werner is a gifted musician and creative songwriter who has dedicated much of his free time practicing and entertaining others at social gatherings as well as university festivities. By dedicating this volume to Werner Delanoy, we express our deep gratitude to a dear colleague and friend. This book is divided into four thematically interconnected parts. Part 1 of the book encompasses chapters on psychological aspects related to teaching and learning a foreign language and presents the latest research on positive language education as well as teacher empathy and well-?being. The opening chapter by Carmen M. Amerstorfer and Peter D. MacIntyre summarises the history of psychology of language learning (PLL) and highlights the most important developments. It furthermore presents the opinions and experiences of ten experts in PLL and attempts a preview of how the field may progress in the years to come. The chapter that follows, composed by Alaa Al-?Tamimi and Tammy Gregersen, empirically investigates the capability of a foreign language teacher to decode his students’ facial expressions and his empathetic responses. The authors combined multiple research methods in this idiodynamic case study to raise the participant’s awareness of the emotions of his students and to discuss his empathetic responses as a practical approach to empathy development. The third chapter in Part 1 by Carmen M. Amerstorfer switches the focus to the wellbeing of three teachers who employ a student-?centred teaching methodology in their foreign language classes. In semi-?structured interviews, the teachers explained how cooperative learning affects their professional contentment and motivation, and they highlighted the importance of positive relationships with students and colleagues. Jean-?Marc Dewaele, Sarah Mercer, and Christina Gkonou investigate the wellbeing of teachers from a different angle, bringing Part 1 of this volume to a close. They quantitatively analysed the wellbeing of 513 EFL teachers in relation to personal and professional background factors, indicating an interplay between the motivation, attitudes, and wellbeing of teachers, the environment in which they work, and the people they work with. Part 2 deals with aspects related to EFL teaching methodology, specifically teaching pronunciation, peer feedback, language assessment, and language learning strategy instruction. In the first chapter of Part 2 Manuela Schlick investigates how kinaesthetic learning material inspired by the practices of Maria Montessori can be used for teaching pronunciation in EFL. She reports a small-?scale research project, in which pre-?service teachers of EFL developed kinaesthetic learning materials to practice English pronunciation and reflected on their experiences. The following chapter by Ha Hoang and Peter Gu was inspired by the reluctance of L2 teachers to endorse peer feedback activities in foreign language teaching. The authors conducted an exploratory study with a peer response task without any teacher guidance in a writing skills class at a Vietnamese university. They convincingly demonstrate that unguided peer response can be valuable alongside guided, focused, and targeted feedback activities as it encourages students’ self-?reflection, critical thinking, text improvement, and joy during the learning experience. The third chapter in Part 2 turns to the topic of language assessment literacy and presents an empirical investigation of the perceived level of difficulty of specified assessment-?related abilities, knowledge, and understanding of pre-?service English teachers in Austria. The authors, Armin Berger, Helen Heaney, and Guenther Sigott, discuss possible implications of the findings of their study for teacher education and language assessment literacy programmes. In the final chapter of Part 2, Pamela Gunning, Teresa Hernández-González, and Joanna White report two studies, one conducted in Quebec, Canada, the other in a CLIL context in Spain. The studies examine the practicalities of implementing strategy instruction for reading in a foreign language with young learners aged 11-12 years. Their research is unique because it implements elements of gamification in strategy instruction, which, to the best of our knowledge, has never been done before. Part 3 addresses current trends and future perspectives of cultural learning through a focus on concepts and approaches including inter- and transculturality, digital citizenship, global learning, as well as cosmopolitanism. The opening chapter by Laurenz Volkmann delineates the educational potential of moments of discomfort that may arise or even be responsibly sought after by language teachers. Drawing on the notion of hermeneutic perturbation, Volkmann elaborates how instances of irritation and embarrassment can be regarded as learning opportunities, which may be productively harnessed and need to be pedagogically framed through materials and tasks. In their chapter, Frauke Matz and Daniel Becker argue for a reconceptualisation of cultural learning in English language education with a view to current global challenges. In light of a world shaped by risks and uncertainties, they highlight the relevance of civic education that starts from a cosmopolitan viewpoint and aims at fostering resilience in (language) learners. Christiane Lütge and Thorsten Merse, in their contribution, reflect on the locus of cultural and global learning within EFL from the perspective of digital citizenship education (DCE). They retrace and merge current discourses on DCE to then put forward a model that anchors the concept within the theory and practice of foreign language education and incorporates larger societal digital transformations. In the last chapter of Part 3, Grit Alter reviews central concepts and paradigm shifts in the context of cultural learning and argues that the goal of becoming culturally competent needs to be revisited considering the implications of digitization. She identifies three main dimensions, namely de-?localization, de-?temporalization, and disembodiment, which emerge from digitized communication and impact on the practice and desired outcomes of cultural learning. Part 4 sets out to...
