Partnership and the integration of language and content teaching in English-medium schools have long been active areas of research and inquiry in applied linguistics and TESOL. However, most researchers have tended to focus on methods and techniques to use in the classroom or on the analysis of the linguistic demands of the content areas. Much less attention has been paid to researching the process of coplanning and co-teaching and to supporting the evolution of the partnership between ESL and content teachers. This paper draws on questionnaire and interview data collected as part of a school-based professional development initiative in an English-medium school in Asia that focused on developing more collaborative relationships between ESL and content/classroom teachers in a large culturally and linguistically diverse elementary school. The paper begins with an analysis of some of the underlying assumptions in current conceptualisations of effective collaboration between ESL and mainstream/content-area teachers, then presents an emerging framework that draws on teacher talk and critical discourse analysis to describe and evaluate the stages of collaboration and the different levels of its effectiveness. The implications of this research for evaluating approaches to partnership and for setting realistic goals for professional development and institutional change will also be explored.
Teacher-based assessment (TBA) is increasingly being promoted in educational policies internationally, with English language teachers being called on to plan and/or implement appropriate assessment procedures to monitor and evaluate student progress in their own classrooms. However, there has been a lack of theorization of TBA in the English language teaching fi eld, with researchers pointing to much variability, a lack of systematic principles and procedures, and a reliance on traditional, but now outdated, psychometric assumptions. This article provides an overview of some of the current issues in TBA, including its defi nition and key characteristics, and the complex but signifi cant questions which its implementation pose for our understandings of language, learning, and assessment.
A growing concern in teacher-based assessment, particularly in assessing English language development in high-stakes contexts, is our inadequate understanding of the means by which teachers make assessment decisions. This article adopts a sociocultural approach to report on the background and findings of a comparative study of ESL teachers’ assessment of written argument in the final years of secondary school in Australia and Hong Kong. Using verbal protocols, individual and group interviews and self-reports, the study explored the different assessment beliefs, attitudes and practices of teachers working with senior secondary Cantonese-speaking students acquiring English as a second language. The study found that the Australian teachers varied considerably in their approach to assessing student work with two somewhat conflicting assessment orientations revealed: the legalistic assessors who ‘ticked the boxes’ according to the published assessment guidelines and those assessors who relied much more on professional judgment. In Hong Kong, there was much more variability in the underlying assessment criteria with consensus reached through reference to community norms rather than explicit statements of performance. The article concludes that traditional notions of validity may need to be reconceptualized in high-stakes teacher-based assessment, with professional judgment, interaction and trust given much higher priority in the assessment process.
Mobile technologies have become inexpensive and ubiquitous. This has led to the
proliferation of mobile technologies being employed by students for mobile learning
(mLearning) purposes. Preferences for mLearning technologies among a higher education
student population at a mid-sized Indiana research and teaching university are explored
in this article. The findings of this research are compared to similar research from
several years prior conducted by Conole, Laat, Dillon, and Darby, 2006. This comparison
yielded some interesting findings such as students in both studies strongly agreeing
that mLearning is an important aspect of their coursework. Other interesting findings
include the laptop remaining as a preferred student technology, and the discussion board
gaining in popularity among the U.S. population when compared to their U.K. counterparts
in the Conole et al. (2006) study. Opportunities for future research relating to
mLearning still remain and are described in this article.
The growth in wirelessly enabled sensor network technologies has enabled the low cost deployment of sensor platforms with applications in a range of sectors and communities. In the agricultural domain such sensors have been the foundation for the creation of decision support tools that enhance farm operational efficiency. This Research Reflection illustrates how these advances are assisting dairy farmers to optimise performance and illustrates where emerging sensor technology can offer additional benefits. One of the early applications for sensor technology at an individual animal level was the accurate identification of cattle entering into heat (oestrus) to increase the rate of successful pregnancies and thus optimise milk yield per animal. This was achieved through the use of activity monitoring collars and leg tags. Additional information relating to the behaviour of the cattle, namely the time spent eating and ruminating, was subsequently derived from collars giving further insights of economic value into the wellbeing of the animal, thus an enhanced range of welfare related services have been provisioned. The integration of the information from neck-mounted collars with the compositional analysis data of milk measured at a robotic milking station facilitates the early diagnosis of specific illnesses such as mastitis. The combination of different data streams also serves to eliminate the generation of false alarms, improving the decision making capability. The principle of integrating more data streams from deployed on-farm systems, for example, with feed composition data measured at the point of delivery using instrumented feeding wagons, supports the optimisation of feeding strategies and identification of the most productive animals. Optimised feeding strategies reduce operational costs and minimise waste whilst ensuring high welfare standards. These IoT-inspired solutions, made possible through Internet-enabled cloud data exchange, have the potential to make a major impact within farming practices. This paper gives illustrative examples and considers where new sensor technology from the automotive industry may also have a role.
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