New competencies in a new era? Examining the impact of a teacher training project

Abstract

This article describes follow-up research aimed at exploring the long-term impact on participants of a teacher training course that integrated a variety of projects focusing on ICT use in language teaching. Internet in education is often promoted for its features that allow for new opportunities for constructivist approaches in the classroom. Nevertheless, this will not simply happen on its own. Teacher education must help shift students teachers’ pedagogical premise toward approaches that promote autonomous learning and collaborative problem-solving. Teacher training can highlight how this can be supported through ICT.The article chronicles the first year following the closure of a teacher-training project, paying particular attention to current practices and perspectives of the primary and secondary education teachers involved. Data were gathered through questionnaires and semi-structured e-mail interviews, along with field notes and ongoing observation of participants’ current teaching environments in order to generate material for triangulation and contextual understanding of the data. The analysis of whether the project described herein has contributed to reducing the gap between the theoretical framework of teaching competences in telecollaboration and its transferral to teaching praxis is significant for future input on other training programmes.

The Computer Literacy and Use: The Case of Taiwanese Pre-service Elementary School English Teachers

“…Previous research exploring language teachers' computer literacy skills has been conducted in Asia (Albilirini, 2006;Aydin, 2013;Chen, 2012;Li & Walsh, 2011;Park & Son, 2009;Shin & Son, 2007;Son, Robb, & Charismiadji, 2011;Sumi, 2010;Yunus, 2007), Europe (Dooly, 2009;Fuchs, 2006), North America (Fuchs & Akbar, 2013;Kessler & Plakans, 2008;Lam, 2000;Meskill, Anthony, Hilliker-Vanstrander, & You, 2006;Wiebe & Kabata, 2010), and South America (Barsotti & Martins, 2010). It has been demonstrated that increased access to technology facilities does not guarantee that language teachers would always integrate CALL into their instruction.…”

Editorial: Teacher education research in CALL and CMC: more in demand than ever

“…More than a decade later, surveys conducted in Spain with primary teachers (Dooly, 2009) and France with secondary school language teachers (Guichon, in press) indicate that, although the use of technologies has seen a rise for personal and professional purposes, few changes can be detected in actual pedagogical practices (see also Fuchs, 2008). Dooly (2009) suggests that the gap might still be too wide between how technologies are presented during training programmes and what teachers are really able to do once they start their professional life. This imbalance raises an issue also underscored by Parks et al (2003): institutional and contextual factors have hardly been taken into account in most studies dealing with language teachers' use of ICT.…”

“…Teachers' attitudes have been found to be one of the decisive factors when it comes to using ICTs in language teaching 1 (Kessler, 2007;Dooly, 2009;Guichon, in press) as 1 The first large study in this regard covering different school subjects was the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) Project which ran for 10 years. The findings were published by Haymore Sandholtz et al (1997).…”

“Are you able to access this website at all?” – team negotiations and macro-level challenges in telecollaboration

“…Kitade, 2012; see also Beatty, 2013). Teachers then see themselves faced with various challenges that call for organizational, pedagogical, technological, intercultural, and socio-affective competencies in order for the telecollaboration to be conducted successfully (Dooly, 2009;Lomicka & Lord, 2011;O'Dowd, 2013O'Dowd, , 2015. In a similar vein, other teacher educators have highlighted the need to foster STs' intercultural communicative competence (Hauck, 2010;M€ uller-Hartmann, 2005), and autonomy and multiliteracy skills (e.g.…”