Melinda Dooly Livres

This guidebook brings together the knowledge, insight and experience gained by the participants of an international telecollaborative language learning project entitled Moderating Intercultural Collaboration and Language Learning (MICaLL). Telecollaboration is understood here as a shared teaching and learning experience between distanced partners that is facilitated through the use of Internet technology; an area of growing interest for many teachers. The book first provides a theoretical outline of suitable pedagogical practices for this type of joint effort and then moves into the more practical aspects of designing, setting up, implementing and evaluating telecollaborative projects. The guidebook considers relevant questions and issues which often come up when teachers without previous experience in telecollaboration undertake this type of enterprise. Through the realistic advice and practical examples provided, the reader will be motivated to engage in telecollaborative language learning projects with their own pupils.

This book provides a nexus between research and practice through teachers’ narratives of their experiences with telecollaboration. The book begins with a chapter outlining the pedagogical and theoretical underpinnings of telecollaboration (also known as Virtual Exchange), followed by eight chapters that explain telecollaborative project design, materials and activities as well as frank discussions of obstacles met and resolved during the project implementation. The projects described in the volume serve as excellent examples for any teacher or education stakeholder interested in setting up their own telecollaborative exchange.

This book provides an accessible introduction to some of the methods and theoretical approaches for investigating foreign language (FL) interaction and exchange in online environments. Research approaches which can be applied to Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) are outlined, followed by a discussion of the way in which tools and techniques for data-collection in diverse online contexts can contribute to our understanding of online foreign language interaction. The compilation of chapters presents a comprehensive overview of key issues in virtual, intercultural and multimodal research contexts and gives insight into the particular challenges and situations which this area of language learning implies. Researching Online Foreign Language Interaction and Exchange addresses the needs of researchers and newcomers to the area who are hoping to learn about the current state of the field by providing overviews of varying approaches and extensive literature review as well as extracts of real data to illustrate the theories, methods or issues in question.

Based on a research project supported by the European Foundation, this book explores how primary and secondary students in four different European countries view theirs and the world’s future. The results indicate that there is a gap between students’ perspectives about the future and a clear pedagogical base for helping students confront many issues that are significant to them. The importance of ensuring students become critically aware citizens and helping them develop the ability and skills necessary for facing the challenges of the future are patent. This book spells out specific ways in which the issues which emerged from the study can be approached from diverse fields (geography, language learning and arts and crafts). It also discusses some cross-disciplinary educational issues relevant to all teachers – general education and cross-disciplinary, as well as offering two proposals on how teachers can count on sufficient psychological support to face the challenges of teaching in an increasingly complex environment and promote cooperative behaviour in the classroom.

How teachers and students work together through discourse to construct their understanding of the context they live and work in will influence, in many different ways, the interaction within their classrooms. This book describes an indepth research that used ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to study three different groups of teachers. The study highlights the teachers’ perspectives concerning heterogeneity in the classroom, using recordings of discussions concerning cultural and linguistic diversity. Moreover, this research examines the discourse participants’ choice in the use (deployment) of categorical descriptions and reveals the speaker as positioned, interested and accountable for meaning construction. Thus, «portraits» of differing preservice and inservice teachers’ orientation towards linguistic and cultural diversity are analysed. By recognising these categorizations as partially bounded by previous knowledge and partially constructed in situ, the research sees meaning-making by teachers as a part of their lived work of teaching. It also reveals the social nature of these categorizations because they are an inseparable element of the socially constituted fabric of language in the environment of schooling and society.

In diesem Beitrag wird untersucht, wie LehrerInnen Kindern Hilfestellungen geben, damit sich telekollaboratives Lernen entwickeln kann. Die Daten wurden von Dr. Melinda Dooly zur Verfügung gestellt und während eines telekollaborativen Projekts zwischen zwei Schulen, einer in Spanien und einer in Österreich, gesammelt. Die Untersuchung geht in erster Linie von einer Analyse der multimodalen Konversation aus und befasst sich mit den Herausforderungen, die bei der Interaktion zwischen telekollaborativem Lernen und der Unterstützung durch die Lehrkraft im Verlauf dieses Prozesses auftreten, wobei audiovisuelle Aufnahmen der Klasse verwendet werden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Strategien wie Direktiven und Anweisungen, ergänzt durch nonverbales Scaffolding wie Gesten, Blicke und Körperaktionen, sehr effektiv für das Fremdsprachenlernen von Anfängern in der Telekollaboration sind. Und das telekollaborative Lernen bietet ein neues Modell für das Lehren und Lernen von Sprachen, das sowohl für die Lernenden als auch für die Lehrenden von Vorteil ist.