During the course of pre and in-service education programmes reflection can happen in a number of ways, for example: reflective journals, personal stories and pair/group co-operative discussions; professional development portfolios; and blogs and electronic portfolios. The aim of this paper is to examine various technologies such as online chat, discussion forums and blogs, in terms of their suitability and affordances as reflective media. It begins by examining positional survey data gathered from student teachers (STs) who have used these social media over a period of time.Following this it focuses on one of the desired outcomes of Reflective Practice (RP), the construction of a teacher identity as part of the process of becoming a professional. The construction of identity through the mediational tool of language used across these modes is examined through a corpus linguistics lens. Collections of language produced around RP activities are analysed as a corpus in quantitative and qualitative ways. These complementary sources of data in a mixed-methods approach provide some insights into the technologies and their potentials in a Language Teacher Education (LTE) context. To this end, our findings suggest that blogs, in particular, foster narration, RP and the expression of identities, while chat and forums promote emotional and affective engagement, all of which can be useful to STs at the initial and continuing stages of their career.
Reflective learning, a practice carrying relatively high educational value, has been with us for some time. Its popularity has grown to the extent that it is often adopted unquestioningly by educational practitioners. However, there are some important questions to be asked in relation to reflective practice. In reality, its impact on improved and enhanced learning and practice, and ultimately its educational value, cannot be known without further examination, research and consideration. This paper uses evidence from a range of spoken and written corpora to gain some insights into the discourse of reflectivity as it is used by students and educators. The data, collected in a third level educational context, involves students performing tasks widely believed to promote reflection. The spoken data comes from student teachers discussing practice language lessons and their general studies, and the written data comes in the form of student essays, online blogs and online discussions from student teachers, language students, and computer science multi-media gaming students. The corpora are firstly examined for engagement in reflection using levels of contribution and interactivity (quantitatively measured through word counts and utterance length). Secondly, comparative frequency lists are used to generate key lexical items (verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns) suggestive of reflective discourse. The analyses suggest that the amount and type of reflection is influenced by the discourse mode, the task, the participants and power dynamics. Ultimately, the objective of this paper is to take a first step towards suggesting a more tangible framework for examining the relatively elusive practice of reflection for educational purposes. In an attempt to do this, it raises some questions and generates further hypotheses for follow-up research investigation.
Coverage of migration in the media intensified during 2015 against the backdrop of a largescale European refugee crisis. Using corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, we explore the representation of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants from September to November 2015, in UK and Irish newspapers. Data was collected from Nexis, using the Baker et al. (2008) RASIM framework. Using corpus linguistic techniques, we identify how these groups are represented, before drawing on CDA to examine the data sets further. Frequency lists of the UK and Irish corpora were compared across variety followed by more detailed diachronic analysis of the most frequently occurring items. The extent to which the issue of migration is refracted through a discourse of terrorism in Irish and UK coverage is compared through cluster analyses and a close CDA analysis of randomised downsamples of the Irish and UK sub-corpora drawing in particular on the DHA approach.
Technological innovation in supporting feedback on writing is well established in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) literature. Regarding writing development, research has found that intelligent CALL systems that respond instantly to learners' language can support their production of better-written texts. To investigate this claim further, this chapter presents a study on learner use of Write & Improve (W&I). The study, based on learner engagement with W&I and learner and teacher surveys and focus groups, demonstrates that learners find W&I to be engaging and motivating. Moreover, there is evidence of improvements in learner writing practices and written language proficiency. For teachers, W&I can render feedback more efficient, allowing them to focus on more complex aspects of learner texts, while spelling and syntactic accuracy are addressed by W&I. Issues also emerge in the use of W&I, which present problem areas for teachers and learners and which signal important future considerations for CALL research.
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