Students’ engagement in reflective tasks: an investigation of interactive and non-interactive discourse corpora

Abstract

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.

Anniversary article: The practices of encouraging TESOL teachers to engage in reflective practice: An appraisal of recent research contributions

“…Some of these studies also used some form of online forums, chats and/or blogs (e.g. Farr & Riordan, 2012;Yang, 2009). For example, Yang (2009) used blogs to encourage reflection in post-observation discussions and discovered that, although there was high and interactive participation among the preservice teachers, overall their reflections tended to be more descriptive than critical in nature, mainly because they feared offending others and damaging friendships.…”

Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Limerick, Ireland

“…Investigations into a range of synchronous and asynchronous online modes of interaction can be found in Riordan & Murray (2010), with a specific focus on blogs in Riordan (2012). Online discourse is compared with more traditional face-to-face modes found in discussions and teaching practice feedback sessions in Farr & Riordan (2012), which provides insights into the various affordances offered by different modes of communication and their potential place as development agents on teacher education programmes. All of these studies employ a corpus-based discourse analysis methodology, which is a strong feature of CALS research in the arenas of discourse and application as seen in the previous section.…”

Investigating Learning Technology By Design Approach in Pre-Service Language Teacher Education: Collaborative and Reflective Experiences

“…Furthermore, collaborative and reflective practices have been acknowledged significantly important in LTE as STs can increase their understandings of their professional experience (Schön, 1983). Farr and Riordan (2012) assert that the reflective practices of the STs in LTE contexts can create new opportunities for continuous reassessment of their thinking in varied situations. Technology integration in LTE, in this sense, needs to be conducted in a more dialogic, interactive and collaborative manner with peers.…”