Introducing creative language learning in Japan through educational drama

Educational Drama as a teaching and learning methodology is already widely in use and well accepted by Australian teachers and students. This paper reports on a study in which the author investigated Japanese primary school students' and teachers' responses to educational drama as a pedagogical tool in their English language classes. The participants had no prior experience of drama in education. Along with the participants' responses, the applicability of educational drama as a teaching method for the Japanese teachers is also discussed. The author, as a teacher-researcher, used action research methods for this study. It became evident that educational drama tended to motivate the Japanese students' foreign language learning of English, by providing them with an opportunity for a higher level of engagement and participation in learning. In the study, the students showed enhancement of the skills necessary for learning, including social, communication, linguistic, non-linguistic and problem-solving skills.

The national mapping of teacher professional learning project : a multi-dimensional space?

This essay focuses on the National Mapping of Teacher Professional Learning (2008), a report that we co-authored along with a number of other researchers on the basis of extensive surveys and interviews relating to the policies and practices of teacher professional learning in Australia. The report is an update of an earlier survey conducted by David McRae and others, entitled PD 2000, and it registers significant changes in attitudes and practices relating to professional learning across Australia in the intervening period. Perhaps the most significant development is the way professional learning is now recognized as an important vehicle for education reform by systems, schools and by teachers themselves, most notably the standards-based reforms that have such a decisive effect on the policy landscape here in Australia and in other countries. The work of the AATE in developing the Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy (STELLA) is mentioned in the report. It was acknowledged that STELLA provides a generative framework for professional learning, sometimes in contradiction to more managerial approaches. The question remains, however, of how English teachers as a professional community might locate themselves within the policy landscape described in this report. This essay is an attempt to promote this kind of discussion and to argue the distinctive nature of the standpoint that English teachers might bring to thinking about and planning for professional learning and practitioner inquiry.

Language and learning preferences : a study of university students in Australia

This study sought to investigate the preferences for language use and modes of learning of university students who were completing undergraduate degrees in Australia. Of the sixty students surveyed, forty percent were international students. For seventy five percent of all students sampled, either they or their parents (or both) were bi- or multilingual. Questions which this research sought to answer were: Do the preferences for learning of university students differ according to the culture and / or language backgrounds of the students? Does an individual student’s preferred learning style influence the student’s preferences for learning in a group situation? For students whose first language is not English, do their preferences for language use vary in group learning? General findings resulting from a statistical analysis of responses to the questionnaire indicated in many, but not all, cases that the preferences for learning of university students differed according to the cultural and / or language backgrounds of the students, that an individual student’s preferred learning style influenced the student’s preferences for learning in a group situation, and that the preferences for language use of students whose first language was not English varied in group learning. Reid’s (1984 in Richards, J.C. & Lockhart, C., 1994) “Perceptual learning style preference questionnaire” comprised one section of the questionnaire for this study. This replication made possible a comparison of the findings which related to students’ learning styles from this study with findings from similar studies in which Reid’s survey instrument had been used. Findings of the present study indicate a number of differences from Reid’s findings. This study found, for example, that most language groups showed a minor preference for group learning using this survey instrument whereas Reid had found that group learning was a negligible preference for most of the language groups in her study. This study may give tertiary educators a greater understanding of their students’ preferences for group and other learning styles. It may also inform them of the likely preferences for language use of those of their students who have first languages other than English. Future students may benefit from this.

Engaging Deakin's international students in ongoing English language development

Universities in Australia, as with universities in the US and UK, are required more and more to adjust to student cohorts which represent a range of national, cultural and linguistic diversity. Many are concerned about the readiness of these students for study in an English-speaking medium and about their subsequent experiences and success. This presentation reports on the outcomes of “The English Language Growth” project, conducted across five Australian universities. This study, funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC), represents the largest of its type in Australia. The project investigated the strategies that international students from non-English speaking backgrounds use to continue to improve their English once entering a university in Australia.

Editorial : English teachers’ work in an era of standardisation

Of particular interest to us, as the editors of this issue of English Teaching: Practice and Critique, is the emergence of standards-based reforms, producing a situation in which English teaching has been subjected to standards at multiple levels – both professional standards that claim to map what teachers “should know and be able to do” (to echo the rhetoric that is typically employed to rationalise/vindicate the development of professional standards) and mandated learning outcomes, whether in the form of learning continua that purportedly capture outcomes that students are expected to achieve at each level of development or in the form of standardised literacy testing (see, for example, Zacher Pandya, 2011).

Automatic rule induction in Arabic to English machine translation framework

This chapter addresses the exploitation of a supervised machine learning technique to automatically induce Arabic-to-English transfer rules from chunks of parallel aligned linguistic resources. The induced structural transfer rules encode the linguistic translation knowledge for converting an Arabic syntactic structure into a target English syntactic structure. These rules are going to be an integral part of an Arabic-English transfer-based machine translation. Nevertheless, a novel morphological rule induction method is employed for learning Arabic morphological rules that are applied in our Arabic morphological analyzer. To demonstrate the capability of the automated rule induction technique, we conducted rule-based translation experiments that use induced rules from a relatively small data set. The translation quality of the hybrid translation experiments achieved good results in terms of WER.

Learning from sustainable landscapes of death in Bali : landscape planning and Tri Hita Karana

Landscape planning in many countries is predicated upon on fulfilling the functions for human living objectives. Many land use practices have been plotted for living, busines~, trading, industrial, farming as well as providing places for dead people primarily through cemeteries. Research in Palm Beach County, FL, has demonstrated the need to plan for 30 years of demand of land use functions to service death (Coutts, Basmaj ian et al. 20 I I). Coutts et al assert that planners are required and responsible for the planning of funeral necessities. Therefore, the protection of landscapes of death is an important consideration in the planning of landscapes. Bali is popular with its beautiful landscape, hospitality, and traditional architecture as demonstrating the integrity between human, environment and God, as expressed in the Balinese Tri Hita Karana concept. Balinese commemorate life from birth to death through their traditional ceremonies which informs their traditional cultural landscape. One of the most important landscapes, which cannot be separated fi·om Balinese life are graveyards which are used for deceased ceremonies. This landscape is an integral part of traditional village patterns across Bali. Culturally, Balinese people have their own traditional cremation ceremony which is call the Ngaben Ceremony. The Ceremony takes place in graveyards and thereupon ashes are placed in the sea waters surrounding Bali. An interesting point of planning in Bali is how to enable eco-friendly interment extensions to villages. This is occurring because of the increasing number of corpses that require cremation thus necessitating no accretions in land provision of graveyards. This research investigates the landscape of death in Bali expressed in its traditional values in the area of planning which implicate sustainable environments and land conservation topics. Other functions of graveyards, as noted by Strangstad ( 1988), include ceremonial and their role as educational tools for history lessons, art, sociology, geology, English lessons, as well as for scavenger hunts.

A psychometric evaluation of the Learning Styles Questionnaire : 40-item version

Sixty-six English-speaking postgraduate distance-education medical students completed the Learning Styles Questionnaire (LSQ: 40-item version). This was completed while attending a residential workshop at the beginning of the semester, and 44 of these students completed the same LSQ questionnaire 5 months later at the completion of the semester. The psychometric properties of the LSQ were assessed using Cronbach’s alpha (internal consistency), test-retest, correlational analyses and factor analysis. The results indicated that the LSQ (40-item version) has poor reliability and validity, and therefore requires further development and psychometric evaluation.

Global English corner : using Elluminate to enhance international students' English language skills

Students at Victoria University (VU) in Melbourne, Australia, undertake their study in an English language context and they have a range of support options to assist with English language development. VU has partner universities in China (Sichuan University, Henan University and Liaoning University). VU’s programs in China often have fewer language support options than programs in Melbourne. The Australian Government’s Transnational Quality Strategy requires that educational programs on- and offshore provide students with a comparable learning experience. Given the relative lack of English speaking opportunities available to VU’s students in China, the university is exploring how technologies might achieve a greater comparability of the student experience. This paper reports on a pilot program that uses Elluminate to conduct English conversations between students in China and Australia. The perceived lack of English competence of international students has been an ongoing issue in Australian higher education while the ‘English corner’ is ‘a characteristically Chinese approach to informal practice’ (Jin & Cortazzi, 2002) that helps students learning English in a foreign context to develop their English language proficiency. How might the idea of ‘English corner’ be used with educational technologies to encourage international students to practise and develop their English? This paper discusses a pilot program at VU that combines the idea of the English Corner together with the online conferencing tool Elluminate and a blog developed in WordPress, to engage Chinese students offshore in English language conversations. Through Elluminate and the Global English Corner blog, a pair of student peers in Melbourne conducts semi-structured conversations with groups of students offshore. In Elluminate, students can both hear and see each other – and they can simultaneously txt chat, share documents, images and websites and use the collaborative whiteboard function of Elluminate – to have dynamic conversations in real time. Preliminary findings of this pilot that uses technology to emphasise the societal aspects of learning – including language learning – will be presented. The discussion will consider how a more widespread English Corner program could aid the transition of international students in Australia, encourage the interaction of local students and international students, increase opportunities for international students to practise English and achieve a greater comparability of language support options on- and offshore.

Learning context in Australian universities - perceptions of Chinese accounting students

The study concentrates on how Mainland Chinese students perceive and respond to the learning in Australian universities. Students' satisfaction with their educational experiences and the Australian learning context such as teaching, teacher/student relationship, assessment, workload and English language is explored in this study. Using focus groups, the results show that teaching, teacher/student relationships and English language are areas of concern.

Storytelling and professional learning

This essay explores the role that storytelling might play in the professional learning of English teachers. It begins by reflecting on the ways that stories shape our everyday lives, and then considers how the meaning-making potential of storytelling might enable us to gain insights into our work as educators. This is in contradistinction to the 'knowledge' currently privileged by standards­ based reforms, most notably the fetish of measurement reflected in standardised testing. The essay concludes that stories are not simply a form of knowing but a vital means of making the world human to us.

Cross-cultural learning and international collaboration: evaluation of a study tour to Thailand

Purpose:
To evaluate cross-cultural learning among Thai staff and host students from the Faculty of Nursing, Mahidol University (MU) and Australian guest students from the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Deakin University (DU), who participated in a study tour.

Design:
Descriptive exploratory evaluation.

Methods:
Key stakeholders were invited to participate resulting in a convenience sample of seven MU staff, five MU and 22 DU students. Data were collected using mixed methods. Qualitative data were theme analysed and quantitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics.

Main findings:
The semi-structured interviews with MU staff, focus group with MU students and free response questions in the online survey with DU students indicated the themes of enhanced and valuable cross-cultural learning and relationship building, the challenges of different social behaviours and the importance of tolerance and acceptance. In the online survey, over 77% (n = 17) of DU students reported high satisfaction with their cross-cultural learning on the study tour. The online survey included the validated Miville-Guzman Universality-Diversity scale short form (M-GUD-S). All Australian students reported seeking diversity of contact (X ± SD = 23.1 ± 4.4), relativistic appreciation (X ± SD = 24.7 ± 3.9), and comfort with differences (X ± SD = 26.2 ± 3.0), indicating high levels of openness to cultural diversity and similarity on the M-GUD-S. 

Conclusion and recommendations:
This study provides an example of an evaluated study tour emphasising cross-cultural relationship building. Findings indicate that nursing education should include opportunities for intercultural exchange among nursing students. Nurses require excellent skills in cross-cultural nursing and relating to meet the future global challenges to health care over the next millennium.