General
introduction — Project
team
— Project
description — Workshop
participants Workshop
report — In
the face of (workshop) adversity — Bibliography
& Webography
Tier 1: Teacher education
and distance language learning
Tier 2: Teaching - Studying
- Learning process — Tier
3: Collaborative learning environment
Evaluation
& Conclusions —
Workshop cartoon
Photo album 1 —
Photo album 2 —
Video album
— BSCW demo
By Anne-Brit Fenner
The examples given in the following Power Point presentation are taken from a one-year postgraduate course in teacher education at the Department of Education, Bergen University, Norway. Students attending the course have finished their language studies, some at Bachelor level, others at Master level. The course consists of intensive periods of lectures on language didactics and pedagogy and two seven-week periods of teaching practice in lower and upper secondary schools. Between 2001 and 2003 we have carried out a research project called INVITIS (Innovasjon med IKT i språklærerutdanningen) financed by the Norwegian Ministry of Education, using ICT in language teacher education.
When introducing ICT, we wanted to focus on the areas where we felt there were weaknesses in the course. This was partly based on student evaluation over a period of a few years, partly on our own evaluation of the course as lecturers. Students felt that during their teaching periods they had too little contact with the department. For financial reasons our supervision of their work in the classroom is limited to one school visit per semester per subject. (Students are qualified to teach two school subjects) Consequently students are mainly left to the supervision of teachers in schools who themselves may or may not be good teachers.
In many cases students do their teaching practice in fairly traditional classrooms and are not given sufficient opportunity to try out new methods of teaching, which they have been introduced to during their teacher education course at the university. As a department of education one of our aims is to influence teaching through our students. By educating students who are familiar with new technologies, recent theory of teaching, and new approaches to language teaching, we can perhaps have an effect on what happens in classrooms. In order for our students to develop their own practical theories of teaching foreign languages, they need a sound theoretical basis. As lecturers and assessors, we were not satisfied with the students' understanding of the need for learning theory and for developing their own theories. As a result of the various aspects mentioned above, we felt we needed closer contact with school supervisors, but first of all, we needed closer contact with our students while they were doing their teaching practice. This could be achieved through the use of ICT, especially through using virtual discussion forums, where students were required to publish different types of texts and teaching programmes and then asked to comment and discuss each other's examples.
The following Power Point presentation shows a few of the areas we decided to focus on in the foreign language teacher education course. It presents some of the aims of our project on using ICT, and three main areas where ICT was used. Each part of the presentation is linked to examples of students' work and extracts from discussion forums. The three main areas are as follows:
Intercultural
awareness I:
This task was a virtual exchange between our students of English and a group
of students doing English at Karl Franzens Universität in Graz. They
were given a number of statements by Norwegian teachers, living and studying
in England, and were asked to respond to and discuss these statements. A few
examples from this virtual exchange are included in the Power Point presentation.
Intercultural awareness II:
The task is shown in the Power Point presentation as it was given to the students.
Linked to the presentation is an extract from the students' discussion forum
(LUVIT). The reason for this task on intercultural awareness was that students
who have finished their language courses at university have a fairly high
level of cultural knowledge or 'background' knowledge ('Landeskunde'). Intercultural
competence and awareness, however, are not included in their language courses,
despite the fact that it is required by school curricula. The students, consequently,
need to understand what the concepts entail in addition to developing such
awareness themselves before they start working as teachers.
Discussing theoretical concepts
In order to ensure that students have gained a reasonably good understanding
of certain theoretical concepts related to teaching in general and to foreign
language teaching in particular, we asked them to discuss, in a virtual forum,
a number of theoretical concepts that are central to the literature they are
required to read during their teacher education course. Experience had shown
that students do not see such understanding as directly relevant to their
teaching practice and consequently postpone reading theory until written and
oral exams are approaching. As a result they fall victim to their school mentors'
opinions and choice of approaches and methodologies rather than being able
to try out new approaches and theories taught and discussed at the university.
An understanding of basic concepts needs to be gained as early as possible
in the course and before the students start their teaching practice. The Power
Point presentation shows examples of some concepts which the students were
asked to explain and discuss.
Analysis of learners' texts to enhance the students' text and genre awareness
Another aspect of language teaching that the students find difficult is assessing
learners' texts and transferring theoretical knowledge into practical experience.
Following lectures on text competence and genre analysis, students were asked
to publish a learner's text from their own classroom and analyse it. This
was followed by comments from the other students in the group and by feedback
from the lecturer.
