Learner strategy instruction and student uptake of strategies in a Japanese as a foreign language context

The Japanese language is recognised as being more difficult than European languages, needing three times more tuition time to reach comparable levels of proficiency. Encouraging Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) students to become aware of, and effectively use, learner strategies is one way to assist them become more controlled, effective learners leading to enhanced language learning. This thesis investigates the development and implementation of a JFL curriculum implemented in a university course for students learning JFL. The curriculum was developed specifically to assist beginner university students with the development of learner strategies appropriate for a JFL reading context. The theoretical underpinning of the study was informed by Educational Criticism (Eisner, 1998), which aims to describe, interpret and evaluate the processes of interaction between the teacher, the learner and the curriculum and the students' learning processes in a tertiary JFL classroom. The study investigated the effect on student learning processes of a JFL reading program that incorporated explicit learner strategy instruction and identified factors that enhanced or impeded the development of learner strategy knowledge. The participants in the study were 29 students enrolled in the course, 10 of whom volunteered to undertake additional tasks, and the two teachers who implemented the curriculum. Data collection involved a number of different strategies to observe the students' participation in the classroom and learning experiences. Learning processes were investigated through TOL protocols, classroom observations, course evaluations, interviews, and learner strategy use measurement instruments (SILL, SILK and SORS) to document student uptake of learner strategies. The design of the study and its applied focus recognised my expertise as a JFL teacher, curriculum writer and researcher, an approach that aligns with the purpose of a Professional Doctorate. Four general thematics, or principles, were identified in this study: „h Explicit learner strategy instruction provides the context for students to develop awareness of learner strategies and take control of their learning; „h Collaborative learning and interaction with teachers offers students the opportunity for shared knowledge construction; „h Reflection offers teachers and students the opportunity to reflect on their own learning style and strategy knowledge, and raises awareness of other available strategies; and „h Diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds have an impact on curriculum implementation and student uptake of learner strategies. The study¡¦s methodological contribution is that it is one of the first in Australia to use Educational Criticism (Eisner, 1998) as a research methodology. The findings contribute to theoretical knowledge in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Second Language Teaching and Learning, Second Language Acquisition and JFL Teaching and Learning by offering new knowledge on the importance of learner strategies in the beginner JFL classroom, the potential of explicit strategy instruction, the value of reflection for both teachers and students, and the important role of the teacher in the process of curriculum implementation. The general principles identified and the findings of this in-depth study of a JFL classroom can be drawn upon to inform other teaching practice situations, and invite practitioners from not just Japanese, but from other language areas and other disciplines, to examine and improve their own practices, and suggest further research questions to pursue this line of enquiry.

Playing with Grammar in the Early Years : Learning about Language in the Australian Curriculum : English

As teacher/researchers interested in the pursuit of socially-just outcomes in early childhood education, the form and function of language occupies a special position in our work. We believe that mastering a range of literacy competences includes not only the technical skills for learning, but also the resources for viewing and constructing the world (Freire and Macdeo, 1987). Rather than seeing knowledge about language as the accumulation of technical skills alone, the viewpoint to which we subscribe treats knowledge about language as a dialectic that evolves from, is situated in, and contributes to a social arena (Halliday, 1978). We do not shy away from this position just because children are in the early years of schooling. In ‘Playing with Grammar’, we focus on the Foundation to Year 2 grouping, in line with the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s (hereafter ACARA) advice on the ‘nature of learners’ (ACARA, 2013). With our focus on the early years of schooling comes our acknowledgement of the importance and complexity of play. At a time where accountability in education has moved many teachers to a sense of urgency to prove language and literacy achievement (Genishi and Dyson, 2009), we encourage space to revisit what we know about literature choices and learning experiences and bring these together to facilitate language learning. We can neither ignore, nor overemphasise, the importance of play for the development of language through: the opportunities presented for creative use and practice; social interactions for real purposes; and, identifying and solving problems in the lives of young children (Marsh and Hallet, 2008). We argue that by engaging young children in opportunities to play with language we are ultimately empowering them to be active in their language learning and in the process fostering a love of language and the intricacies it holds. Our goal in this publication is to provide a range of highly practical strategies for scaffolding young children through some of the Content Descriptions from the Australian Curriculum English Version 5.0, hereafter AC:E V5.0 (ACARA, 2013). This recently released curriculum offers a new theoretical approach to building children’s knowledge about language. The AC:E V5.0 uses selected traditional terms through an approach developed in systemic functional linguistics (see Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) to highlight the dynamic forms and functions of multimodal language in texts. For example, the following statement, taken from the ‘Language: Knowing about the English language’ strand states: English uses standard grammatical terminology within a contextual framework, in which language choices are seen to vary according to the topics at hand, the nature and proximity of the relationships between the language users, and the modalities or channels of communication available (ACARA, 2013). Put simply, traditional grammar terms are used within a functional framework made up of field, tenor, and mode. An understanding of genre is noted with the reference to a ‘contextual framework’. The ‘topics at hand’ concern the field or subject matter of the text. The ‘relationships between the language users’ is a description of tenor. There is reference to ‘modalities’, such as spoken, written or visual text. We posit that this innovative approach is necessary for working with contemporary multimodal and cross-cultural texts (see Exley and Mills, 2012). We believe there is enormous power in using literature to expose children to the richness of language and in turn develop language and literacy skills. Taking time to look at language patterns within actual literature is a pathway to ‘…capture interest, stir the imagination and absorb the [child]’ into the world of language and literacy (Saxby, 1993, p. 55). In the following three sections, we have tried to remain faithful to our interpretation of the AC:E V5.0 Content Descriptions without giving an exhaustive explanation of the grammatical terms. Other excellent tomes, such as Derewianka (2011), Humphrey, Droga and Feez (2012), and Rossbridge and Rushton (2011) provide these more comprehensive explanations as does the AC:E V5.0 Glossary. We’ve reproduced some of the AC:E V5.0 glossary at the end of this publication. Our focus is on the structure and unfolding of the learning experiences. We outline strategies for working with children in Foundation, Year 1 and Year 2 by providing some demonstration learning experiences based on texts we’ve selected, but maintain that the affordances of these strategies will only be realised when teaching and learning is purposively tied to authentic projects in local contexts. We strongly encourage you not to use only the resource texts we’ve selected, but to capitalise upon your skill for identifying the language features in the texts you and the children are studying and adapt some of the strategies we have outlined. Each learning experience is connected to one of the Content Descriptions from the AC:E V5.0 and contains an experience specific purpose, a suggested resource text and a sequence for the experience that always commences with an orientation to text followed by an examination of a particular grammatical resource. We expect that each of these learning experiences will take a couple if not a few teaching episodes to work through, especially if children are meeting a concept for the first time. We hope you use as much, or as little, of each experience as is needed. Our plans allow for focused discussion, shared exploration and opportunities to revisit the same text for the purpose of enhancing meaning making. We do not want the teaching of grammar to slip into a crisis of irrelevance or to be seen as a series of worksheet drills with finite answers. Strategies for effective practice, however, have much portability. We are both very keen to hear from teachers who are adopting and adapting these learning experiences in their classrooms. Please email us on b.exley@qut.edu.au or lkervin@uow.edu.au. We’d love to continue the conversation with you over time.

Scaffolding reflective inquiry - enabling why-questioning while e-Learning

This paper presents some theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives that might inform the design and development of information and communications technology (ICT) tools to support reflective inquiry during e-learning. The role of why-questioning provides the focus of discussion and is guided by literature that spans critical thinking, inquiry-based and problem-based learning, storytelling, sense-making, and reflective practice, as well as knowledge management, information science, computational linguistics and automated question generation. It is argued that there exists broad scope for the development of ICT scaffolding targeted at supporting reflective inquiry duringe-learning. Evidence suggests that wiki-based learning tasks, digital storytelling, and e-portfolio tools demonstrate the value of accommodating reflective practice and explanatory content in supporting learning; however, it is also argued that the scope for ICT tools that directly support why-questioning as a key aspect of reflective inquiry is a frontier ready for development.

Overview of INEX 2013

INEX investigates focused retrieval from structured documents by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organizations to compare their results. This paper reports on the INEX 2013 evaluation campaign, which consisted of four activities addressing three themes: searching professional and user generated data (Social Book Search track); searching structured or semantic data (Linked Data track); and focused retrieval (Snippet Retrieval and Tweet Contextualization tracks). INEX 2013 was an exciting year for INEX in which we consolidated the collaboration with (other activities in) CLEF and for the second time ran our workshop as part of the CLEF labs in order to facilitate knowledge transfer between the evaluation forums. This paper gives an overview of all the INEX 2013 tracks, their aims and task, the built test-collections, and gives an initial analysis of the results

New directions for digital video creation in the classroom : spatiality, embodiment, and creativity

This column features a conversation (via email, image sharing, and Facetime) that took place over several months between two international theorists of digital filmmaking from schools in two countries—Professors Jason Ranker (Portland State University, Oregon, United States) and Kathy Mills (Queensland University of Technology, Australia). The authors discuss emerging ways of thinking about video making, sharing tips and anecdotes from classroom experience to inspire teachers to explore with adolescents the meaning potentials of digital video creation. The authors briefly discuss their previous work in this area, and then move into a discussion of how the material spaces in which students create videos profoundly shape the films' meanings and significance. The article ends with a discussion of how students can take up creative new directions, pushing the boundaries of the potentials of classroom video making and uncovering profound uses of the medium.

Journalism Across Cultures : An Introduction

In today's global digital world, journalists are required to be cognizant of ethical and cultural issues beyond usual national boundaries. Drawing on global examples, this text examines international journalism through the authors' wide variety of cultural, educational, teaching and learning backgrounds, including their professional and practical experiences. While existing books tend to be more focused on specific regions or specific aspects of journalism, this book addresses in a comprehensive way journalism across cultures from a truly global (and holistic) perspective. It analyzes media systems in Africa, Latin America, the Arab world and the Middle East, China, as well as North America and Western Europe. This text is truly interdisciplinary in theoretical and practical approaches because it draws on other fields such as media and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, as well as politics and international relations. It will provide an introduction to cross-cultural journalism and equip students with the skills and understanding they need today.

Toward a more holistic analysis of international news flows

The study of international news flows has been a dominant topic of international communication research during the past 50 years. This paper critically reviews past approaches to the analysis of news flows and identifies the main strands of research in this field. In line with some previous critiques of the field, we argue that past research has for too long been influenced by dichotomous debates that failed to take account of the complexities of international news decisions. A new direction is needed in order for news flow research to provide better answers to the recurring questions. This new direction is not a break from past approaches but rather an integration of all different approaches, which would provide researchers with a more holistic framework for analyzing international news flows. This new approach calls for a combination of political, economic, geographic, historical, social and cultural factors, including perspectives from other disciplines, such as anthropology and linguistics.

Online teacher education : lessons from the cyber-trenches

This paper provides an overview of ‘lessons learned’ from the author’s decade long involvement in online teaching and learning, including eight years in the development, implementation, teaching and administration of a wholly online Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics coursework degree program, which attracted several hundred students annually from around the world, and has won awards for innovation, including being identified as a ‘flagship’ program during an external review of the university.

Generating natural language texts from business process models

Process Modeling is a widely used concept for understanding, documenting and also redesigning the operations of organizations. The validation and usage of process models is however affected by the fact that only business analysts fully understand them in detail. This is in particular a problem because they are typically not domain experts. In this paper, we investigate in how far the concept of verbalization can be adapted from object-role modeling to process models. To this end, we define an approach which automatically transforms BPMN process models into natural language texts and combines different techniques from linguistics and graph decomposition in a flexible and accurate manner. The evaluation of the technique is based on a prototypical implementation and involves a test set of 53 BPMN process models showing that natural language texts can be generated in a reliable fashion.

Aligning in and through interaction : children getting in and out of spontaneous activity

Spontaneous play, important for forming the basis of friendships and peer relations, is a complex activity involving the management and production of talk-in-interaction. This paper focuses on the intricacies of social interaction, emphasising the link between alignment and affiliation, and the range and importance of verbal and nonverbal interactive devices available to children. Analysis of the way in which two girls, one of whom has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, engage in spontaneous activities demonstrates the potential for interactional difficulty due to the unscripted nature of the interaction. The paper argues for further research into how improvised, unscripted interactions are initiated within moment-by-moment talk, how they unfold, and how they are brought to a close in everyday contexts in order to understand how children create their social worlds.

"The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes" reviewed by Karen Woodman

English for specific purposes is a critical, but often under-researched, area in the fields of TESOL and Applied Linguistics, so the publication of a collection on this topic is a very positive development for those who work and/or research in the area.

Do spoken nonword and sentence repetition tasks discriminate language impairment in children with an ASD?

The primary aim of this paper was to investigate heterogeneity in language abilities of children with a confirmed diagnosis of an ASD (N = 20) and children with typical development (TD; N = 15). Group comparisons revealed no differences between ASD and TD participants on standard clinical assessments of language ability, reading ability or nonverbal intelligence. However, a hierarchical cluster analysis based on spoken nonword repetition and sentence repetition identified two clusters within the combined group of ASD and TD participants. The first cluster (N = 6) presented with significantly poorer performances than the second cluster (N = 29) on both of the clustering variables in addition to single word and nonword reading. The significant differences between the two clusters occur within a context of Cluster 1 having language impairment and a tendency towards more severe autistic symptomatology. Differences between the oral language abilities of the first and second clusters are considered in light of diagnosis, attention and verbal short term memory skills and reading impairment.

Predicting sense convergence with distributional semantics : an application to the CogALex-IV 2014 shared task

This paper presents our system to address the CogALex-IV 2014 shared task of identifying a single word most semantically related to a group of 5 words (queries). Our system uses an implementation of a neural language model and identifies the answer word by finding the most semantically similar word representation to the sum of the query representations. It is a fully unsupervised system which learns on around 20% of the UkWaC corpus. It correctly identifies 85 exact correct targets out of 2,000 queries, 285 approximate targets in lists of 5 suggestions.

Overview of INEX 2014

INEX investigates focused retrieval from structured documents by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organizations to compare their results. This paper reports on the INEX 2014 evaluation campaign, which consisted of three tracks: The Interactive Social Book Search Track investigated user information seeking behavior when interacting with various sources of information, for realistic task scenarios, and how the user interface impacts search and the search experience. The Social Book Search Track investigated the relative value of authoritative metadata and user-generated content for search and recommendation using a test collection with data from Amazon and LibraryThing, including user profiles and personal catalogues. The Tweet Contextualization Track investigated tweet contextualization, helping a user to understand a tweet by providing him with a short background summary generated from relevant Wikipedia passages aggregated into a coherent summary. INEX 2014 was an exciting year for INEX in which we for the third time ran our workshop as part of the CLEF labs. This paper gives an overview of all the INEX 2014 tracks, their aims and task, the built test-collections, the participants, and gives an initial analysis of the results.

Analysing children’s persuasive texts : the use of hedging and intensification

Research Quality This is a dialogue between two Australian literacy scholars about two persuasive writing techniques that posed difficulty for the students in our research. This dialogue flows from the analysis of Year 6 writing samples from an ARC Linkage Project, URLearning (2009-2013) - the focus of the symposium. We use vivid examples of writing from students’ handwritten persuasive texts on topics that were chosen by teachers. The persuasive structure in the texts followed the Toulmin (2003) model: a thesis statement, three arguments with evidence, and a conclusion. The findings show that to realise the effective power of rhetorical persuasion, students need an expanded lexicon that does not rely on intensifiers, and which employs a greater range of advanced hedging techniques to use to their advantage. National & International Importance The study is potentially of national and international relevance, given that argumentation or persuasion is a key life skill in many professional, personal, and discourses. It is also a requirement in the International English Language Testing Systems (IELTS) tests, which are a critical gateway for tertiary studies in many English-speaking countries (Coffin, 2004). Timeliness The research is timely given the Australian Curriculum English, in which persuasive texts figure prominently from Preparatory to Year 10 (ACARA, 2014). The recommendations are also timely in the context of educational policies in other parts of the world. For example, in the United States, the Common Core Standards: English Language Arts, mandates the teaching of persuasive texts (Council of Chief State School Officers & National Governors Association, 2013) Implications for practice/policy The findings of the study have specific practical implications for teachers, who can address the persuasive writing techniques of hedging and intensification with which children need targeted support and explicit instruction. The presentation is positioned at the nexus of teacher practice to better address the national priorities of the Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2014), while having implications for applied linguistics research by identifying common problems in students' persuasive writing.