The relationship between student-centred lectures, emotional intelligence, and study teams:a social telemetry study with mobile telephony

A student-centred approach to teaching has been conceptualized as a key driver in higher education to facilitate understanding of concepts and improve attainment. The occurrence of student study team behaviours is diagnostic of this approach to teaching. However, the extent to which team behaviours are performed outside the parameters of formal teacher-learner environments remains under-researched. This is problematic as it is unclear whether study teams are maintained outside the confines of lectures, and the extent to which they impact on individual student grades. A naturalistic observational study was carried out that utilized short message text service communication as a means to record the frequency of team behaviours within informal environments. The findings suggest the frequency of team behaviours: 1) were positively associated with student grades; 2) increased after lectures independently rated as low in employing a student-centred focus; and 3) were facilitated by students' trait emotional intelligence.

Qualitative psychology at M level: a dialogue between learner and teacher

There are now more postgraduate programmes that include qualitative methods in psychology than ever before. This poses problems for teaching qualitative methods at M level because we still lack consistency in what qualitative methods are taught at the undergraduate level. Although the British Psychological Society requires accredited undergraduate programmes to include qualitative methods, we hear very different stories from colleagues across the UK about provision and quality. In this article, we present a dialogue between learner and teacher about our own experiences of qualitative methods in psychology at M level. We report our own learning experiences of qualitative methods at the undergraduate level, reflect on current methods of teaching at M level, and consider ways of moving forward. As well as focusing specifically on current practice at our institution, our discussions also branch out into wider issues around the fundamental characteristics of qualitative methods, pragmatically and philosophically, as well as our own accounts of what we enjoy most about using qualitative methods in psychology.

Learner initiative in the language classroom

This article looks at learner initiative in teacher-fronted activities and how this can influence classroom interaction. Extracts from lesson transcripts of adult evening classes in Italy are used to give a precise definition of what is meant by learner initiative and to illustrate how it can change interaction patterns. It is suggested that learner initiative could have an important role to play in promoting comprehensible input and output and therefore language learning. It will be seen how, by giving learners more space and time, initiative can be actively encouraged. However, there are direct implications for teacher training as it is necessary to change traditional interaction patterns and make learner initiative more effective.

The operation of repair in L2 learner conversation, group work and classroom discourse

The present study is an empirical investigation into repair in spoken discourse, specifically focusing on L2 learner conversation, group work and teacher-fronted classroom interaction. The core of the investigation concentrates on identification of the problem type, classification of repair strategies and examination of interaction in the repair process. A comparison between Conversation (CS), Group Work (GW), and Teacher-fronted classroom interaction (CR) suggests that more repair is undertaken in CS. The results of the study suggest that the fundamental differences between CS, GW and CR are of two types: in the frequency of repair and in the nature of the repair itself. It has been found that other-initiation for production problem repair occurs mainly in CR, other-completion is characteristic of GW and self-repair is most frequent in CS. Factors affecting the occurrence of repair in CS, GW and CR are related to content and social and communicative features of context. Importantly, the study shows the frequency of repair in GW falls between that of CS and CR in most of repair strategies. This result lends support to the argument that group work can assist L2 learners to develop their communicative competence. It is suggested that the analysis of the repair process in CS, GW and CR can be useful in throwing light on the intricacies of spoken discourse in general and can be exploited by applied linguists for both theoretical and pedagogical purposes.

Speaking out of turn? Taking the initiative in teacher-fronted classroom interaction.

Teacher-fronted interaction is generally seen to place limitations on the contributions that learners can make to classroom discourse and the conclusion is that learners are unable to experiment with, for example, turn-taking mechanisms. This article looks at teacher-fronted interaction in the language classroom from the perspective of learner talk by examining how learners might take the initiative during this apparently more rigid form of interaction. Detailed microanalysis of classroom episodes, using a conversation analysis institutional discourse approach, shows how learners orient to the institutional context to make sophisticated and effective use of turn-taking mechanisms to take the initiative and direct the interaction, even in the controlled environment of teacher-fronted talk. The article describes some of the functions of such learner initiative, examines how learners and teachers co-construct interaction and how learners can create learning opportunities for themselves. It also briefly looks at teacher reactions to such initiative. The article concludes that learner initiative in teacher-fronted interaction may constitute a significant opportunity for learning and that teachers should find ways of encouraging such interaction patterns.

Doctoral work in translation studies as an interdisciplinary mutual learning process:how a translator, teacher educator and linguistic typologist worked together

The focus of this paper is on the doctoral research training experienced by one of the authors and the ways in which the diverse linguistic and disciplinary perspectives of her two supervisors (co-authors of this paper) mediated the completion of her study. The doctoral candidate is a professional translator/interpreter and translation teacher. The paper describes why and how she identified her research area and then focused on the major research questions in collaboration with her two supervisors, who brought their differing perspectives from the field of linguistics to this translation research, even though they are not translators by profession or disciplinary background and do not speak Korean. In addition, the discussion considers the focus, purpose and theoretical orientation of the research itself (which addressed questions of readability in translated English-Korean texts through detailed analysis of a corpus and implications for professional translator training) as well as the supervisory and conceptual processes and practices involved. The authors contend that doctoral research of this kind can be seen as a mutual learning process and that inter-disciplinary research can make a contribution not only to the development of rigorous research in the field of translation studies but also to the other disciplinary fields involved.