Collaborative writing (CW) has been proven advantageous to enhance the second and foreign language skills of university students. However, little research to date has explored whether CW practices ...are fruitful for secondary school learners in foreign language (FL) contexts, a population characterized by low language proficiency levels, and few opportunities to engage with the FL. The present classroom-based study examines CW in this setting and aims to determine whether CW fosters language opportunities, operationalized as language-related episodes (LREs), which will allow learners in low-input scenarios to compose better texts. Two parallel intact classes were studied: a control group (n = 16) which produced an argumentative essay individually, and an experimental group (n = 16) which did so in pairs while recording their interactions. The findings revealed that the pairs produced shorter but more accurate and slightly more lexically and grammatically complex texts and obtained higher scores in content, structure and organization. Collaboration afforded students the opportunity to pool ideas, deliberate over language use, and provide each other with feedback (collective scaffolding). Most importantly, collaborating seemed to be beneficial for all intermediate secondary learners and, thus, a useful strategy for improving FL writing skills in the secondary school context.
Previous studies have concluded that ICT are underused in primary and early childhood classrooms partly due to lack of appropriate training. This study explores ICT use and the validity of a training ...proposal as reported on a survey by two groups of students after their teaching practicum. Results showed traditional technological tools were used more frequently than collaborative tools and suggest that receiving an instructional technology course provided students with a broader toolkit of ICT tools, a more critical opinion of technology use and an increased sense of agency.
This study examines the suitability of telecollaboration practices to enhance ICT integration in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)-based units by analysing the number and type of ...episodes related to students' technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) produced in a telecollaboration whose aim was the design of a technology-enhanced CLIL unit. Results revealed a high number of episodes focusing on the domains and intersections of the TPACK framework, that pedagogical content knowledge was the main focus of attention and prompted most of the suggestions for change in the unit and that telecollaboration promoted collaboration and made participation more equal. Consequently, telecollaboration showed a great potential for directing students' attention to their TPACK even though the scarcity of episodes focusing on the TPACK intersection also indicated there is ample room for more teacher training efforts to prepare pre-service teachers for technology integration.
Knowledge about CLIL teaching approaches and the effective integration of ICT into learning processes seem paramount to the success of CLIL in different contexts. Nevertheless, research has shown ...that pre-service and in-service teachers feel unprepared for effective CLIL programme implementation. Recent research has pointed out that material design might be a successful way of improving knowledge and an aid to help teachers realise effective ICT integration efforts. This study reports on the results of a project which through the creation of specific materials for schools explores CLIL knowledge and ICT integration together with students’ perceptions in a pre-service teachers training programme. Results indicate awareness of the stages needed to develop CLIL appropriately, and capacity to use ICT in all the stages and to integrate various dimensions of knowledge together with very positive perceptions, which support learning outcomes and point to increased motivation. Nevertheless, the tasks showed ample room for improvement, especially regarding the integration of language and more innovative uses of ICT.
The series Trends in Applied Linguistics meets the challenges of the rapidly growing field of applied linguistics. In a very broad sense, applied linguistics is understoodby focusing on the ...application of theoretical linguistics to current problems arising in different contexts of human society. Given the interdisciplinary character of applied linguistics, the series includes cognitive, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and educational perspectives. The following topicsare included in the series: Second language acquisition and the acquisition of additional languages Bilingual and multilingual education Language planning and language policy Literacy skills Second/foreign language pedagogy Translation and interpretation Language for specific purposes Discourse analysis Language testing and assessment Child language Language and gender Pragmatics and rhetorics Corpus analysis Critical pedagogies Research methodology in applied linguistics Language and technology.
Few studies have gauged the effects of Computer Assisted Language Learning –CALL– on the verbal accuracy of students. The current study explores the use of Hot Potatoes JCloze-type exercises as ...supplementary classroom work to enhance the English tense accuracy of university students enrolled in three EFL proficiency level courses -high-intermediate (B2) and advanced (C1 and C2). Tense marking was measured before and after a period of autonomous, self-paced CALL work in which students could access theoretical information and practiced with Hot Potatoes exercises. The comparisons revealed that the experience was mainly beneficial for the C1 level course group, the other two experimenting non-significant gains. Results only partially support a boosting effect of CALL additional practice. They also suggest that proficiency should be taken into consideration as it can affect the effect of treatment as not all the proficiency level courses experienced advantages. Alternatives to improve effectiveness are then suggested.
It has been claimed that the repetition of the same task type with different content, known as procedural repetition (PR), seems to offer opportunities to focus on form and develop syntactic ...complexity. At the same time, PR is common and deemed appropriate for the language classroom. This quasi-experimental study explores the effects of PR on the overall production of 5 pairs of young Spanish EFL (age 11) learners in a school context with a beginner level of English. The pairs co-constructed and narrated three stories following the same procedure at three testing times over a three-week period. The analysis of the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of their narratives shows that, unlike previous studies, PR does not have any significant impact on the students’ performance, except for lexical density, which increases in the third attempt. In light of these results, the validity of PR for child populations is discussed.
Varios estudios han mostrado que repetir la misma tarea con diferente contenido, lo que se denomina repetición procedimental (RP), ayuda a prestar atención a la forma y al desarrollo sintáctico. Asimismo, la RP es común y apropiada para el aula. Este experimento investiga los efectos de la RP en la producción de 5 parejas de niños españoles (11 años) aprendiendo inglés como lengua extranjera en un colegio y con un nivel de principiante. Las parejas construyeron y narraron tres historias, una cada semana, siguiendo un procedimiento similar. El análisis de la complejidad, precisión y fluidez de sus narraciones muestra que la RP no tiene un impacto significativo en las narraciones de los estudiantes, excepto en el caso de la diversidad léxica, que mejora en la tercera narración. A la luz de los resultados, se discuten las posibilidades de la RP con niños.
Model texts in the context of collaborative writing with young learners (YLs) have been shown to promote noticing and incorporation of features in students' subsequent drafts. However, few studies ...have analysed the quality of the drafts and even fewer have considered task motivation, despite its great impact on task completion.
To fill in these gaps, our study measured draft quality and task motivation (with thermometers gathering students' ratings and motives) with Spanish YLs of English in primary school. Thirteen pairs of students (aged 10–11) wrote the same composition twice (pre-test and post-test) divided into a control group (CG), which received no feedback, and a model group (MG), which worked with model texts.
Draft quality analyses revealed non-significant and medium-sized effects in syntactic complexity (clauses to T-units, dependent clauses to clauses and T-units, r = 0.44) and fluency (number of clauses, r = 0.32) in the MG. Meanwhile, a medium magnitude effect was detected in accuracy gains for the CG (L1 structures, L1 structures to clauses and lexical errors to words). Regarding task motivation, students' ratings were high, mainly justified by peer work and significantly higher after-task and across tasks in both groups, although the MG evidenced a significant and medium-sized (r = 0.53) drop in the post-test.
Our findings tentatively support the potential of models to generate upgraded texts but also suggest a possible motivational cost worth further investigation. More generally, our study enhances the motivational value of collaboration among YLs.
Context or the teaching/learning environment has only recently been recognized as a mediating variable in L2/FL written performance. These studies are multisite and have not yet targeted another ...feature of context: the sociolinguistic status of the target language. Likewise, scarce research exists examining the prolonged effects of collaboration. The present classroom-based study fills this void by investigating the effects of collaboration on the (a) jointly written texts; (b) subsequent individual texts; and (c) texts written in two distinct sociolinguistic status target languages of two groups of 11–12-year-old Spanish primary education students. Distributed into a control (CG) (
= 17) and an experimental group (EG) (
= 10 pairs), they wrote three descriptive texts in each language, L2 Basque and FL English: the first and third individually and the second one individually by the CG and in pairs by the EG. The texts were examined qualitatively with a rubric and quantitatively for fluency and accuracy measures. Immediate and prolonged effects of collaboration were observed on accuracy, while fluency decreased and global qualitative scores varied very little. Additionally, unlike in the CG, language-dependent differences were not attested in the EG which suggests that collaborative writing is an expedient tool to increase attention to language and limit the mediating effects of the learning context.
This article examines the third language (L3) developing morphology of 78 Basque-Spanish bilinguals following a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) program and a mainstream English as a ...foreign language (non-CLIL) program. The analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal oral data shows that (1) the omission of inflection in the L3 English interlanguage of these groups of learners is due to problems with the realization of surface morphology, (2) there is a dissociation in frequency of suppliance between suppletive inflection (copula and auxiliary be) and affixal inflection (the third person morpheme -s and the past tense morpheme -ed) already attested in L2 data, and (3) no significant differences were found between the two groups tested as far as the development of suppletive and affixal tense and agreement morphemes. The overall findings seem to support full-UG explanations for the variable use of morphology in the acquisition of non-native systems.
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