This open access book analyzes language education through a socio-material framework. The authors revisit their position as researchers by decentering themselves and humans in general from the main ...focus of research activities and giving way to the materialities that are agentive but often overlooked parts of our research contexts and processes. Through this critical posthumanist realism, they are able to engage in research that sees society as an ethical interrelationship between humans and the material world and explore the socio-materialities of language education from the perspectives of material agency, spatial and embodied materiality, and human and non-human assemblages. Each chapter explores language educational contexts through a unique lens of (socio)materiality. Based on how the authors conceptualize (socio)materiality, the book is organized in three sections that seek answers to the following overarching questions: In what ways do material agencies emerge in language educational contexts? How are educational choices and experiences intertwined with materialities of spaces and bodies? What assemblages of human and non-human may occur in language education contexts? Each chapter questions, in its own way, the notion of the human subject as rational, enlightened being and sole possessor of agency, and offers examples of allowing for other-than-human agency to enter the picture. Together, the contributors exemplify how researchers who have been committed to social constructionist thinking for most of their careers learn to make space for new theories, thus inspiring and encouraging readers to remain open for new intellectual and embodied endeavors.
In many places, Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) has been taught in much the same way for the past twenty years: Pre-service teachers learn to teach reading, writing, speaking, ...listening, grammar and vocabulary through models such as content or task-based instruction. They learn about the local curriculum, the CEFR and the history of teaching methods and basic foundations of education and learning. Their basic education is solid and founded yet rarely do students learn to question the content they are provided with or the materials they are expected to work with in the public schools. It is for this reason that, as a small part of in-service teacher EFL training, a short, independent-study module has been created that helps pre-service students to look at their future practices in a different, more critical, and richer light that hopefully disrupts their thinking about how language should and can be taught.
In addressing the recent special issue in
Frontiers in Psychology
, namely “
Positive Psychology in Foreign and Second Language Education: Approaches and Applications
,” calling language education ...researchers around the globe to study positive emotions, positive personality traits, and positive institutional tendencies and their implications for language education systems, stakeholders, and policy practices, the present conceptual review paper aims to acquaint language education researchers, practitioners, instructors, and learners with the main tenets of positive psychology and their application in second/foreign language (L2) education research. Accordingly, by drawing on the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, we explain how individuals' positivity can result in their flourishment and development in any aspect of life, including L2 learning and teaching. Then, we introduce and conceptualize seven instances of positive psychology variables, namely academic engagement, emotion regulation, enjoyment, grit, loving pedagogy, resilience, and well-being and explain how these positive factors contribute to desirable L2 learning and teaching experiences. Subsequently, potential theoretical and pedagogical implications are drawn to enhance the quality and effectiveness of language education systems and their respective stakeholders. In the end, the limitations of the studies in this area are explicated, and suggestions for future research are provided to expand the extant literature on positive psychology in the domain of L2 education.
Second/foreign language teaching has been found as one of the most emotional professions worldwide. To generate optimal academic outcomes and run an effective education, teachers and students' ...emotions and feelings must be positively cared for. Given the significance of emotions in L2 education, many studies have followed positive psychology (PP) and examined various positive constructs. Nevertheless, love, as a PP variable, has been ignored in education due to its cultural/religious sensitivities. Trying to dispel the myths, recently, a new trend called a "loving pedagogy" has started to find itself a place in second language acquisition (SLA) research and practice. Yet, proposing a model of its application and an agenda for its research has been overlooked by scholars in this domain. Motivated by this lacuna, this research article provided the conceptualization, definitions, research bases, practical models, and implications of a loving pedagogy for SLA practitioners and future researchers.
Forcing the transition from traditional face-to-face, classroom-based methods to online teaching and learning, the Covid-19 pandemic has further expanded the challenges of contemporary education in a ...globalised world, characterised by increasing cultural and linguistic diversity. This paper provides a critical account of the Bolzano Meisei English Programme (BMP), a collaborative project established between the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and Meisei University of Tokyo during the SARs-Cov-2 crisis in the spring of 2020. By reflecting on this experience, characterised by intrinsic aspects of originality related to the multilingual and multicultural background of the countries involved, the study aims to discuss the challenges and opportunities of online language teaching and learning in the global digital world. The study is framed in the perspective of Globalised Language Education (GLE) and based on ethnographic approaches (Starfield 2010; Carspecken 1996) and reflective analysis (Gibbs 1988). The dataset is comprised of analogue and digital data, collected in the form of field notes, personal communications, video recordings, email exchanges, and student reflections. BMP offered participants an international collaborative learning experience, supporting the idea that English can be a window into a range of cultures that are perhaps geographically distant but accessible through digital technologies. While the programme was successful in many respects and well received by participants and stakeholders, it also faced challenges that may be useful for future projects and the advancement of teacher education.
Translanguaging generally refers to the use of two or more languages consciously or unconsciously at the same time for communicative purposes in a multilingual context (Conteh, 2018). Pedagogical ...translanguaging is the teaching practice that utilizes various teacher-planned activities to foster language and content learning in classroom settings by activating all the linguistic knowledge students already possess (Cenoz & Gorter, 2022). In this connection, pedagogical translanguaging provides a theoretical and instructional approach to support the development of all the languages used by multilingual learners. More importantly, the strength of pedagogical translanguaging lies in its potential to inspire confidence and encourage participation in language classrooms. Because learners are allowed to take advantage of their entire linguistic repertoire to be fully engaged in the learning of a target language (Hirsu, Zacharias, & Futro, 2021). However, there are more things to consider than meets the eye for the implementation of pedagogical translanguaging.
The performance of existing sign language recognition approaches is typically limited by the scale of training data. To address this issue, we propose a mutual enhancement network (MEN) for joint ...sign language recognition and education. First, a sign language recognition system built upon a spatial-temporal network is proposed to recognize the semantic category of a given sign language video. Besides, a sign language education system is developed to detect the failure modes of learners and further guide them to sign correctly. Our theoretical contribution lies in formulating the above two systems as an estimation-maximization (EM) framework, which can progressively boost each other. The recognition system could become more robust and accurate with more training data collected by the education system, while the education system could guide the learners to sign more precisely, benefiting from the hand shape analysis module of the recognition system. Experimental results on three large-scale sign language recognition datasets validate the superiority of the proposed framework.
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