This study focused on the development of reading and writing skills to a group of B1 level learners of English in a private language institute in Athens, Greece with the aid of blogs (a web tool), since Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) enhances foreign language learning. To this end, two groups of young learners were formed; the control group which was taught through the traditional coursebook and the experimental group which was taught through a differentiated approach to language teaching. The differentiated approach which was applied involved eight teaching sessions in a private language institute. Pre-tests and post-tests were administered to both groups in order to evaluate the use of CALL in the improvement of literacy skills. Pre- and post- semi-structured interviews were also conducted with the students of the experimental group to evaluate their attitudes and feelings before and after the instruction. The aim of using blogs, as a web tool, was to enhance collaborative learning and social interaction. This research attempted to prove that blogs create a social interaction between students, and between the students and the teacher. For the purposes of this research, students were involved in process writing by making drafts and writing their posts and in active reading when they read other posts and texts from other web sites.
Everything is a sign and still nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted' (Semetsky 2017:8), is the stance taken by the editor of the book, in the first chapter of this book. I have always been fascinated by signs and their interpretation, by how signs transform or transmute into other signs and evolve -through time -into other signs or sign systems, or even revolve around an already existing sign system which is reproducing itself. A bird's eye view may direct an interested party to no correlation between education and semiotics, yet signs exist in textbooks, in pictorial presentations of objects and even in language itself as symbols, icons, etc., are all aids to learning, in the case of a foreign language, the learning of new words (see also Nöth 2014). A student may not remember a word, in the foreign language, if asked by the teacher, but given a picture, an icon, the student may be able to produce the word both phonemically and graphemically. But as the human race evolves so do signs. Nevertheless, it seems that we are 'born' with a predisposition to 'know', 'interpret' and 'use' signs as it comes natural for a student, from as early as primary school, to see a picture of a child with earphones, in his or her textbook and to realize that s/he will probably be doing a listening exercise within the next few minutes. Thus, it seems that we not only use signs, but as Semetsky ( 2017) puts it we, as humans, are signs too.Τhe gap between semiotics and education was first bridged in 2008, at the University of Oulu, in Finland, by officially giving a 'name' to two different disciplines, namely education and semiotics and thus coining the term edusemiotics as an autonomous transdisciplinary field. Semetsky and Cambell (2018) place this date a little later, in 2014 in the IASS congress in Sofia, Bulgaria, and more specifically in the New Bulgarian University in which 'theoretical semiotics' first appeared. This book, which consists of twenty chapters, focuses upon semiotics, educational theory and practice as well as educational philosophy.The second chapter which, in fact, follows the first, namely the introduction section previously discussed, probes into the academic culture, after the 17 th century, and the science of signs, and supports that human experience is filtered through a 'dynamic interaction', as
The findings show that visual arts-based instruction positively impacts learners' oracy abilities, vocabulary development, and formulaic assimilation. Art has always been a potent medium for teachers of all subjects contributing to learners’ social, emotional, intellectual and physical evolution. However, it often becomes subjugated and considered as unnecessary and extracurricular. The particular research aims at exploring the ways Art can be integrated into the first grade of Greek State Primary School curriculum for English language learning and exploited for the benefit of young learners. More specifically, this research aims to investigate whether art, and particularly visual arts, can emerge as an invaluable tool which will enhance instruction for the learning of English as a foreign language, thus triggering motivation which will lead to young learners’ enhancement of their speaking skills. In addition to this, this research explores the effects of visual arts-based instruction on vocabulary, and language chunks development, through young learners’ engagement in a number of multisensory tasks deriving from works of art presented to them. For this reason, action research was carried out among thirty-two first grade learners of a state primary school in Greece, who were divided into two groups, a control and an experimental group. The information obtained through both quantitative and qualitative tools of data collection will be exploited for this research as they can prove that the participants of the experimental group improved substantially concerning all the three variables compared to the participants of the control group. The results of this small-case research cannot be disregarded as they indicate that the use of visual arts can have a considerably positive effect on young learners’ receptive and productive oracy skills.
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