FERREIRA DANIEL

This case study reports on the language socialization and written performance of two first-year Japanese students at a liberal arts college in Tokyo. With a focus on the students’ learning experiences, this research triangulated the analysis of transcripts and interviews, field notes, and observations to explore how students from a 450-550 TOEFL cohort engaged in academic writing tutorials with their teacher. A report on the students’ use of short discourse markers, language display (e.g. gestures, facial expressions), and the use of external aids (e.g. manipulating a mouse pointer, writing notes) reveals a process where the end result is greater than the sum of its parts. That is, how students communicate what they retain at the time of the tutorial experience may not be as self-evident compared to the follow-up writing drafts. Through the implementation of verbal and non-verbal cues during student-teacher tutorials, the students were able to improve their writing skills.

The shift from the industrial-age model of learning to one driven by the global knowledge economy has placed a burden on institutions of higher education to modernize teaching methodology. Although iterations of modern technology continue to mark their presence to varying degrees in learning environments globally, linking the instructional use of modern affordances with enhanced learning outcomes remains an issue. More than ever, research in effective integration points to professional development as the linchpin for success. This essay reviews the latest research and proposes ideas for adapting some of the best practices for professional development today at the individual and institutional levels.

Just as internet access has shifted from a 20th century novelty to a modern-day basic utility, so has the popularity of learning a specialization online become the norm and not the exception. Despite the growing demand for providing online courses/programs on a global scale, attrition rates remain unfavorably high compared to traditional face- to-fact learning. Although research related to online teaching methodology has made much progress, there remains a plethora of studies related to cultural barriers in the virtual world of learning. In this literature review of Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Model, the implications of the framework’s four indexes—power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism-collectivism, and masculinity-femininity—are considered alongside with practical strategies for overcoming teaching methodological challenges.

With the expansion of digital tools developed for language learning environments, new instructional practices are available that enable students to engage in more robust writing experiences. In the following paper, several instructional practices are introduced that enhance learning in a university level writing course. Digital tools such as Google Docs and Google Drive are highlighted to create better feedback opportunities; ones that allow students and teachers to be more efficient and collaborative when commenting on essays. Online reflective journals are introduced to illustrate how students and teachers can participate in a community of learning and inform each other to minimize redundancy and create better learning opportunities. If teachers can incorporate digital tools that encourage their learners to develop digital literacy skills, a more efficient and accessible learning environment can be created for students.

Peer editing is an instrumental part of the writing process. Like any new skill, however, students need to be explicitly taught how how it works. Web 2.0 tools, such as Google Drive, now make it much easier for instructors to not only manage the writing process regardless of class size with relative ease but also to train students in the benefits of the peer editing process. This article will suggest ways on how to use Google Docs to create a writing e-Portfolio followed by tips on how to foster effective peer editing practices.

Presentation assignments for second language speakers can take several forms, such as a traditional class presentation or a poster presentation. Poster presentations, which are given repeatedly to small groups, seem to have several advantages, including increased speaking opportunities, more interaction between the speaker and the audience, and less anxiety for the speaker. However, these benefits have not been discussed critically in the literature, let alone researched in experimental studies. This article compares poster presentations and class presentations and their effects on 75 low-proficiency speakers of English at a Japanese college. Video-recorded data, two recall tests, and learner surveys were used to test the hypothesis that poster presentations would lead to an increased rate of speaking, more vocabulary retention, and better affective effects. The results confirm some of these hypotheses, and highlight several factors that second language instructors should consider when planning oral presentations.

Error correction in the EFL writing curriculum is a practice both teachers and students agree is important for writing proficiency development (Ferris, 2004; Van Beuningen, De Jong, & Kuiken, 2011; Vyatkina, 2010; 2011). Research suggests student dependency on teacher corrective feedback yields few long-term benefits for the developing writer. (Bruton, 2009; Lee, 2004). Encouraging the learners to manage grammatical mistakes, as part of the learning process, must be followed up with post-writing activities that help them become more accountable and more autonomous in developing accurate rewrites. In this project, technological resources combined with peer group support and teacher assistance were used to scaffold the learners approach to error correction that showed positive knock-on effects for writing accuracy.

Developing communicative skills in English where it is a foreign language is a frustrating challenge for the L2 learner. Information and communication technologies (ICT) offer the possibility for L2 students to develop those skills collaboratively. The purpose of this article is to share the idea of building a student-centered community online where the students use the Internet as a creative space to develop their L2 identities. In this project, a first-year university class at a Japanese women’s college use blogging as a space to develop and communicate their learning experience in English. A second class uses video screen capture software to record a news report and then share their imagined L2 identities with the first class via the blog. The end of term revealed that the learners’ positive response to this project could be an instrumental approach to developing autonomous L2 communities beyond the classroom.

Although free writing is an activity used for developing fluency in writing, unchecked errors can be counterproductive for the EFL writer yet correcting repetitive errors can be very time consuming. This article will show how I use technology and other resources in the classroom to provide corrective feedback to university students tasks such as free writing.

“Scaffolding”, in the educational sense, is about providing instructional support in a specialized area of second language use and/or acquisition. This article will discuss how a desktop screen capturing web tool can be used to scaffold the development of a student web blog community.