This paper proposes a distance-based doctoral supervisory model to support students in the process of navigating self, agency, and emotions over their doctoral journey. The model emerged through our ...examination of the lived experiences of three Chinese female doctoral students who, though enrolled as internal students in our New Zealand university, were prevented by the pandemic from returning from their Spring Festival sojourn to China, and continued their study by distance. We employed narrative analysis to deeply engage with their stories shared in diaries and one-on-one interviews, alongside social media interactions. These revealed a strong commitment to study emanating from answerability toward their research projects, already underway, and agentive actions to maintain peer-to-peer academic and emotional support, enabling resilience and reflexivity about personal values and needs. Learning from this experience, we emphasize in our model the need to nurture important bonds between students, their peers and their supervisors in online environments.
Guided by the framework of internationalization at home (IaH), this study employed a mixed-methods approach investigating the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) among a group ...of tertiary English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Taiwan, facilitated through the means of telecollaboration. The telecollaboration incorporated 30 EFL learners and 30 learners of Chinese from Australia and New Zealand. Data collection encompassed EFL learners' responses to a self-assessment questionnaire, their reflective essays, alongside instructors' reflective journals. The findings showed that EFL learners held positive perceptions regarding their telecollaboration experience and reported substantial growth in ICC across three dimensions: cognitive, affective and behavioral. In applying various multimodal communication strategies, EFL learners realized and valued cultural similarities and differences. Their reflective accounts exhibited evidence of enhanced linguistic and cultural competences. The telecollaboration enabled them to increase their confidence in utilizing English, hone their digital literacy skills for effective communications, and establish conducive environments for their relational and emotional development with their teammates and instructors. The latter provided indispensable emotion in varying contingent situations. Incorporating the insights drawn from the instructors' reflective journals, the study argues that telecollaboration as a pedagogical practice is the significant essence of effective IaH curriculum design and implementation.
Game-based learning (GBL) has been widely recognised in research, and evidently benefited for learners. However, what GBL is perceived by teachers and learners has been a concern that might impact on ...quality of teaching and learning in the GBL environment. Game-based pedagogy meticulously designed from a teacher's perspective was regarded as harping on the same string without fun by learners. This paper aims to explore games literacy capabilities in supporting teachers to implement GBL that meets learners' needs and expectations. Semi-structured interviews and surveys with experienced teachers of GBL and experts in the relevant field were conducted, followed by an Analytic Hierarchy Process seeking perceptions of a group of academics and researchers. Findings suggested five key capabilities in game literacy required by teachers in implementing GBL. They are (1) basic games literacy, (2) high-level games literacy, (3) instructional design for GBL. (4) organisation and management for GBL, and (S) evaluation of GBL. Amongst the five, instructional design for GBL and high-level games literacy were rated highly impacting on the quality of teaching. Based on the findings, aiming at informing teacher education and professional development, we proposed a framework providing a guidance to improve game-based design and pedagogical practices for teachers in the implementation of GBL in their classrooms. It concludes that teachers' capabilities in games literacy require specific attention to instructional design that demands a thought-provoking process for GBL.
Based on the concept of Communities of Practice (CoPs), this study describes the design and implementation of an online academic conference, Pedagogy and Practice in Technology Enhanced Language ...Learning (PPTELL) 2021, as a backdrop for exploring how to effectively promote the development of academic citizenship within the PPTELL CoP. To address this, we propose a framework focusing on four interrelated and interdependent dimensions: ubiquitous technologies, social practice, knowledge building, and academic citizenship. The conference utilized Zoom, Second Life, Slido, and several social media apps for various sessions and activities. A triangulation design was employed to analyze data from a post-conference online survey and observation notes. Our findings highlighted the effectiveness of the design in fostering academic citizenship, supported by multiuser virtual worlds like Second Life that enabled social engagement and knowledge building. We also discuss potential solutions to the challenges encountered, taking into account the nature of academic and higher education environments today.
This study explores the process of Community of Practice (CoP) building for language teachers' professional development through the support of a WeChat group. WeChat is an instant messenger app that ...provides a multimodal platform for one-on-one and group interactions through text, audio and video. In order to support the implementation of flipped classrooms in a Chinese programme offered in an Australian university, a teachers' chat group was created on WeChat for just-in-time and collaborative professional development. This qualitative study focuses on three dimensions in the CoP, namely, mutual engagement, a joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire to examine how these Chinese teachers worked together to form their own CoP in their WeChat group. Qualitative data were collected through group chat interactions on WeChat, teacher reflective journals and a focus group discussion through audio conferencing on WeChat. Discussions of the strategies and challenges involved in the building of an active and sustainable online CoP through social media contribute to our understanding of professional development in a digital age.
旅澳具臺灣背景家庭之語言維護與身分認同 蔡佩舒(TSAI, Pei-Shu); 祁越(QI, Grace Yue); 蘇珊娜．伊森許拉斯(EISENCHLAS, Susana A.) ...
International journal of Chinese language education,
12/2022, Volume:
12, Issue:
12
Journal Article
English has become a compulsory subject from Primary Three in China since 2003 and is gradually being introduced even earlier into the curriculum in many schools. This highlights the official ...importance of English in both primary school education and society. However, although a compulsory subject, there are fewer English lessons than for Chinese and mathematics, the other core subjects. This raises questions about the real status of English in primary school education and whether it is really perceived as important. This paper firstly examines China’s current primary school English language education policy and discusses the implications for the primary school curriculum. Adopting a qualitative research design, which included six focus group interviews with students, the study investigated the attitudes of students toward the learning of English in the primary schools. The study was conducted in three different government schools with varied socio-economic status. Findings show the positive attitudes of children toward English education and their support for the early introduction of English; however, some feel that English is not as important as Chinese and mathematics. After reporting and discussing the different perspectives of the students, this paper concludes by considering the implications for English education in primary schools in China and other Asian countries.
In the last five years or so, research has extensively explored the benefits and problems of flipped classrooms in helping improve the student learning experience. However, little attention has been ...given to the kinds of support that students would need in the process of mastering learning outside class. To address this gap in research and practice, the current study proposes and evaluates a learning support framework for mastery-based learning outside class that aims to respond to students' cognitive and affective needs and needs for developing appropriate learning strategies. The proposed framework was evaluated in a Chinese language course offered at an Australian university in Semester 1, 2016. This study focuses on the qualitative data collected through courses, such as screen captures of various learning support mechanisms, a student survey, and reflective journals from teachers. Our findings highlight the necessity, benefits, and challenges of offering learning support for mastery-based learning outside class in the flipped classroom context.
This is a qualitative examination of how a Chinese language teacher responded to challenges and developed her agency in a unique teaching and learning environment, termed as the blended classroom. ...The uniqueness of this classroom lies in its attendance by two cohorts of students at the same time -- a face-to-face and an online group. The online group joined the face-to-face group and the teacher via a synchronous online classroom called Blackboard Collaborate. Through analysing data from the teacher's reflection, face-to-face and email interviews and the recordings of her blended class, this research unfolds a semester-long trajectory of her agency development in the blended classroom. Guided by the Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST), we conclude that teacher agency is a system composed of multi-layers of subsystems and it is a product of the constant interaction amongst these interconnected and interdependent subsystems, with certain subsystems playing a more dominant role than others at a given stage of one's agency development. This finding led to our proposal of a framework of teacher agency system. This research advances our understanding of teacher agency as a system in the context of online and blended learning.
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