The present paper details the experience of designing and running the first online English language courses at Yarmouk University with the support of the Open University of Catalonia. The courses fall within the framework of the EQTEL project, which aims to develop and implement accreditation standards, guidelines and procedures for quality assurance of online courses in Jordanian universities.The focus of the research was to evaluate the course from the teachers' perspective while identifying possible stumbling blocks and challenges that could be used to refine and enhance the course and the teacher preparation program in successive iterations. Teachers completed a questionnaire that sought to reveal their beliefs, attitudes and experiences using technology for language instruction.The study concluded that teachers perceive more affordances in using technology to practice receptive skills (listening, reading) than productive skills (speaking, writing). Teachers evaluated the teacher preparation prior to the course as sufficient but expressed contradictory attitudes towards using technology for language instruction which need to be understood within the context of the institutional culture and the decision-making process behind technology adoption.
The Challenge Given the wide-spread use of video calls and the affordances the medium provides for foreign language learning and, specifically, for oral interaction, how do learners manage the use of multimodal and multilingual elements in oral interactive tasks? Do multimodality and linguistic repertoires aid comprehension and enhance the meaning negotiation process?
This study investigated the relative effectiveness of immediate and delayed corrective feedback on the acquisition of -ing/ -ed participial adjectives by Spanish English-as-a-foreign-language learners in video-based computer-mediated communication. Fifty-two participants took part in a communicative task in one of four groups (two experimental and two control). The immediate-feedback group received explicit corrective feedback during the task whereas the delayed-feedback group received the feedback 24 hours later by means of an edited video recording of the interaction. The effects of the feedback were measured through an oral production task and an untimed grammaticality judgment test. Although the results showed no differences between the two feedback timing groups and control participants on the grammaticality judgment test, both feedback groups outperformed the control group on the oral production task without showing statistically significant timing effects.
This paper explores teachers' feedback practices in an online language teaching course. We examine several variables that could have an impact on providing effective and meaningful feedback essential to account for students' rate of completion of a one-semester course. Classroom size, amount of teacher-student and student-student interactions, and teachers' experience levels are considered when examining 43 upper-intermediate online English classrooms. These practices were checked against students' completion rates over the semester to identify the variables that may account for student progress. The data analysis helped assess the effect of a small teacher professional development intervention and indicates that student engagement is crucial in online language learning.
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