Chicana, Indian and Sudanese Perspectives of Teaching in the Academy: Three Levels of Experience in the Teaching-Learning and Social Environment

“Women of color from any culture or country face additional barriers in predominantly white institutions. This panel presents perspectives and experiences of three women from three cultures and three different levels of academia—a Chicana Latino visiting professor, a graduate teaching assistant from India, and a Sudanese graduate research assistant.”

Language Learning in 3D Virtual World

Second Life (SL) is an ideal platform for language learning. It is called a Multi-User Virtual Environment, where users can have varieties of learning experiences in life-like environments. Numerous attempts have been made to use SL as a platform for language teaching and the possibility of SL as a means to promote conversational interactions has been reported. However, the research so far has largely focused on simply using SL without further augmentations for communication between learners or between teachers and learners in a school-like environment. Conversely, not enough attention has been paid to its controllability which builds on the embedded functions in SL. This study, based on the latest theories of second language acquisition, especially on the Task Based Language Teaching and the Interaction Hypothesis, proposes to design and implement an automatized interactive task space (AITS) where robotic agents work as interlocutors of learners. This paper presents a design that incorporates the SLA theories into SL and the implementation method of the design to construct AITS, fulfilling the controllability of SL. It also presents the result of the evaluation experiment conducted on the constructed AITS.

Prospective EFL (English as a Foreign Language) Teachers’ Perceptions of Learner Autonomy

This study investigated prospective EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers’ perceptions of learner autonomy. Main aim was to see whether the education they receive on how to teach English make any difference in prospective EFL teachers’ perceptions regarding learner autonomy. A researcher-developed questionnaire was administered to 179 students studying in the program of ‘Teaching English as a Foreign Language’ at Anadolu University in Turkey. Results of the study indicated that generally there is not much difference between the first and fourth year participants of the study in terms of their perceptions of learner autonomy.