This study measured changes in cultural awareness levels between two groups of US students in their third semester of a Spanish class. One group (experimental group) collaborated via Skype with a group of English language learners from a Colombian university and the other group (control group) did not. The experimental group met seven times during the semester to discuss a variety of cultural topics such as health care and gastronomy. The control group addressed the same topics by examining them among members of the same class. Both groups answered a pre and post self-awareness questionnaire. Mixed factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) results showed significant differences between the two groups. There was no change in scores from pretest to posttest for the control group, but scores in the trained group increased significantly. Students from the treatment group show substantial gains in skills, knowledge, and awareness of themselves in their interactions with others in one semester.
<p>The goals of this research were twofold. First, to measure changes in cultural awareness levels between two groups of students in their third semester of a Spanish class. The trained group formed by university students from the USA collaborated with another group of university students from Colombia using Skype. The second aim was to identify attitudes of decentering or thirdness in the trained group. This group met seven times during a 13-week semester to discuss a variety of cultural topics such as college life and daily routines. The control group addressed the same issues by examining them among members of the same class and answered a pre-and post-self-awareness questionnaire. Mixed factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) results showed a significant increase in interculturality scores in the trained group. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis of the video recordings, essays, and video chats from the trained group showed dispositions to <em>decentering</em> (<em>thirdness</em>) or to engage in an understanding process of the other (Kramsch, 1993). This group exhibited attitudes of curiosity and openness during the Skype sessions. Their essays were elaborate; the topics were varied, indicating the experience of productive social interactions. This group also avoided the use of essentialist or static cultural representations of the other in their narratives.</p>
Novice learners comprise the majority of language students in higher education, but very few decide to continue their foreign language education beyond the required credits. Educators must develop a deeper understanding of what motivates this group of students so they can design pedagogical practices that will help students shift from a checklist mindset to a lifelong commitment approach to language learning. This qualitative study examines the role that a motivational focus and future-self guides play in the language learning experience of novice language learners, taking a language class for the first time, from the USA, and the role that a grammar-based pedagogy has on the formation of those self-guides. Interviews with ten novice language learners showed that six students exhibited a strong promotion focus with an ideal L2 self available in their professional-self concept. Prevention-focused students with an available ought-to L2 self preferred classroom experiences centered around grammar topics while those with a promotional focus preferred culture-based lessons. This study makes recommendations on how language educators could maximize students’ level of engagement by knowing their students’ motivational focus.
Language teacher educators train pre-service teachers in numerous theories and pedagogical practices of language learning and language teaching. They expect that their student teachers will translate this conceptual and practical knowledge into action during their practicum. However, in the process of determining pre-service teachers’ readiness for the field experience and the profession in general, methods classes measure only their conceptual knowledge and omit looking at their student teachers’ belief system about language teaching and learning. This belief system is a strong indicator of how the students organize their knowledge for application (Borg, 2003) and may help teacher educators gauge students’ read ness in the use of new pedagogies that these pre-service teachers may not have experienced before. Using two reflective essays and a piece of authentic assessment as instruments to gather data, as well as Jürgen Habermas’s theory on cognitive interests as a framework to explore the espoused beliefs of nine pre-service language teachers at the end of a methodscourse, this qualitative study addressed the following questions: What levels of cognitive interests do the nine pre-service world language and ESL teachers exhibit prior to student teaching? To what extent do the students’ levels of cognitive interests change during the methods course called Teaching a Second Language? What are the most common cognitive interests regarding such areas of teaching performance, such as methodology and assessment among the participants? The results show that the nine pre-service teachers held mostly technicaland some practical cognitive interests at the beginning of the semester. In the end, most of the participants held practical interests, and three out of the nine pre-service teachers held elementary emancipatory beliefs. One pedagogical recommendation is to include experiences in the training of pre-service teachers that promote emancipatory beliefs that could support teachers in their pursuit of transforming challenging social conditions while examining and adopting new pedagogies.
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