Many learners are now quite digitally skilled. However, this does not entail that they know how to learn through digital technologies. Therefore, establishing an interactive virtual learning platform that connects everyone together in a classroom environment and helping learners become familiar with such media might serve a set of purposes in any educational setting. Today, with the advances in web-based learning technologies, a hybrid teaching methodology has become widespread: blended learning. It is a term used to describe the way e-learning is being combined with traditional classroom methods and independent study. Educators design online materials and utilize them in synchronous or asynchronous ways to suit the convenience of learners and instructors and program demands. In this study with a group of intermediate-level English language learners at the School of Foreign Languages of an English-medium state university, the goal was to enhance students' vocabulary learning performance by using synchronous and asynchronous games and activities that will activate and maintain intrinsic motivation in an effort to teach parts of speech and collocations over a period of eight weeks. The data consisted of a survey of students' reflections on their vocabulary learning experiences through digital games and activities. The findings were discussed with respect to the efficiency of incorporating synchronous and asynchronous learning materials.
In an effort to create enriched language learning environments, language teachers, program and course developers, and publishing companies have long sought novel ideas and alternatives. Thus, a wide range of information and communications technologies, which have manifested themselves in the form of virtual learning environments, web-based platforms, or mobile-assisted applications, have been embraced in the field. With the introduction of new means and platforms for delivering instruction outside the classroom, blended learning, combining e-learning and conventional classroom methods as well as providing room for student control over the learning process, has gained popularity as a promising option. In this case study, which focuses on a group of second-year English language students at a School of Foreign Languages, the goal was to investigate students' attitudes towards blended learning with reference to six learning aspects: learning-flexibility, online-learning, study-management, technology-use, classroom-learning, and online-interaction (Tang & Chaw, 2013). Students' responses to the attitude questionnaire were subjected to descriptive statistical analysis as well as internal consistency tests among subscales. A subsequent focus group meeting was held with a group of 15 students to attain qualitative data on their views and attitudes towards blended learning with respect to their experiences and expectations. Highachievers had a tendency to hold positive attitudes towards all learning aspects while low-achievers required more face-to-face in-class time, interaction and study management support, pointing to possible links among such variables as language proficiency, learner autonomy and attitudes towards blended learning and highlighting how critical student characteristics and attitudes could prove in the implementation process.
Learning Advisory Program (LAP) was launched at Yıldırım Beyazıt University School of Foreign Languages in the 2015-2016 academic year. The LAP, under the guidance of the instructors and advisors at the Independent Learning Centre (ILC), was planned to be used initially with students of a specific profile, composed of low-achieving, unmotivated students – the so-called ‘repeat’ students. In our case, ‘repeat’ students pose a challenge in that teachers have difficulty identifying their individual needs, and catering for them. To address this, we enrolled these students in a partially online blended learning program. Students were also informed about the possibility of getting individual support from ILC advisors. In order to facilitate the advising sessions, new materials and tools have been devised or adapted. A few months’ experience in advising has given us a better understanding of our students and raised our motivation to turn the LAP into a more functional system.
This working paper elaborates on a series of written advising email exchanges conducted with an AYBU-SFL student who volunteered to become an advisee and receive online written advising from one of the researcher-LAs in this study. The study spans a period of seven months, final three months overlapping the pandemic-related lockdown during which instruction at the university was delivered online. The purpose was to exploit the strategies and tools of advising asynchronously via email utilizing Intentional Reflective Dialogue (IRD) to promote deeper reflection, while at the same time facilitating advisee engagement and encouraging advisee ownership by considering certain motivational processes, including emphasizing effort, creating hope, respecting power, building relationships, expressing enthusiasm, challenging and prompting. In the paper, the context and background, and the purpose are introduced briefly. Then the motivational processes used are presented with reference to the written advising data pointing out and illustrating how motivation-boosting elements were incorporated in this series of IRD email exchanges. Finally, the impact of exploiting motivational resources is further discussed so as to bring insights to how advisors’ focus on motivational elements while conducting advising sessions influence the overall flow with respect to advisee engagement and ownership of the process.
Emotion concepts across different cultures and languages have been studied extensively. New research on emotion concepts can efficiently capture the "experience-near" and "universal" aspects of cultures and languages for the construction of a language-independent semantic metalanguage, namely the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) (Goddard, 1998). Wierzbicka (1999) claims that lexical discriminations in the area of emotions (as well as in other semantic fields) provide important clues to the speakers' conceptualizations, and thus, a considerable amount of lexical data collection and of serious semantic analysis is needed before any universals in the area of emotion concepts can be proposed. Based on the classification of the cognitive scenarios for emotion terms in Wierzbicka (1999), the current study investigated one area of the emotion lexicon in English and Turkish, that is, a set of terms within the domain of "I don't want things like this to happen". It explored how these concepts relate to each other in terms of their cognitive scenarios intra-linguistically and whether their cognitive scenarios match within the domain of "I don't want things like this to happen". The study revealed the core meanings of target concepts show a high amount of correspondence, excluding cases of immediacy and intensity.
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