This article discusses a two-year telecollaborative project in teacher education that took an integrated approach to teaching about and through technological resources in order to introduce student-teachers to innovative methods for communicative-based language learning through computer-mediated communication (CMC). Via ‘technological immersion’, student-teachers in two groups in Spain and the US were required to work together online to give peer feedback and evaluation of several activities, including teaching sequences. They also co-created podcasts, along with accompanying educational activities. Some of the tools used were Moodle, Skype, emails, wikis, Second Life and podcasting. The article analyzes and discusses multimodal data collected during the collaboration. Results indicate that the online collaboration enhanced teacher development through opportunities unavailable in more traditional teacher education classrooms and enabled student-teachers to better make connections between theory and practice.
This article presents a pedagogical design for teacher education that combines flipped materials, in-class instruction, and telecollaboration (also known as virtual exchange) for foreign language teacher education. The context of this study is a course on technology and language learning for future teachers in which the flipped classroom concept was applied to technology-infused collaborative teacher training between future ESL/EFL instructors located at two partner universities (one in the USA, one in Europe). The three main teaching approaches (flipped materials, in class, and telecollaborative, or “FIT”) were symbiotic in that each structure reinforced the other through reception, discussion, and reflection as a means to help the student teachers bridge the gap between theory and practice. We apply classroom ethnographic discourse analysis to data sources (face-to-face and online discussion groups, student e-portfolios) to look at uptake of ideas, conceptual understanding, and successful transfer of new knowledge, and thereby identify whether the design provides significant learning opportunities for the future teachers. Although most studies of telecollaboration in language teacher education look principally at output, this approach allows an in-depth look at the learning process as knowledge is developed collaboratively between the participants.
Despite the accumulated body of research on teaching English as an international language (EIL), few have offered a detailed overview of how to implement an EIL classroom, and still fewer empirical studies have been conducted. Twenty-one university students at a Japanese university participated in the study in the spring semester of 2015. The videoconference-embedded classroom (VEC) as an instructional intervention was implemented for 14 weeks: (1) pre-videoconference task (i.e. reading and presenting/discussing EIL issues) (11 weeks), (2) during-videoconference task (i.e. interacting online with EIL experts from three circle countries) (2 weeks), and (3) post-videoconference task (i.e. writing/presenting the final term paper on EIL issues) (1 week). Using a mixed research method consisting of a questionnaire, post-course class evaluations in spring 2014 (without VEC) and spring 2015 (with VEC), and in-class observations, VEC was found to have important pedagogical benefits as it created an interactive learning environment and deepened the understanding of the EIL content. Additionally, 81% of the participants had positive perceptions of EIL. Pedagogically, practitioners can implement EIL ideas using VEC pedagogy at the instructional level. Theoretically, it can also add new empirical findings to the field, which may help bridge a discrepancy between theory and practice.
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