Introduction
The assignments in this iteration of CTCH 603 are designed to fit together into a coherent program of research & teaching, and the communication of the conjunction of that research and teaching to me, to peers and to any wider audience with whom you choose to share your work.
While the assignments themselves have specific requirements, I have tried to leave the content you explore to fulfill those requirements as open as possible. I really do want each of you to engage with an areas (or areas) which intrigues you, about which you are passionate, or with which you are already working in the classroom. Try to use this freedom to carve a pathway that will support your own goals and aspirations for your participation in the Higher Education Program.
| Knowledge Building Assignment | | Teaching and Research | | Teaching with Technology Philosophy |
Journal # 1
The Development of E-mail Literacy: from Writing to Peers to Writing to Authority Figures
By Chi-Fen Emily Chen
Language Learning & Technology, 10, 35-55.
When I began pursuing my second bachelor’s degree in America five years ago, I encountered a lot of difficulties that I had never expected. One of them was e-mail communication with my professors. I wondered whether my e-mails should look like letters or look like speech, and I wasn’t sure if the words that I was using were appropriate for e-mail communication. In addition, I didn’t know the proper tone of language that is expected in e-mails between students and professors in America. I struggled more when I was writing e-mails to professors than when I was writing papers for class. In “The Development of E-mail Literacy: from Writing to Peers to Writing to Authority Figures,” author Chi-Fen Emily Chen suggests that the difficulty that I had faced was common to international students who are studying in institutions of higher education in America.
In her paper, Chen argues that the development of e-mail literacy, which is the pragmatic competence and critical language awareness in using the e-mail medium, is a pressing issue in the digital era. Studies of the e-mail practices of international students have found that these students have ineffective communicative skills with regard to e-mail interactions with professors. Foreign students, in comparison with American students, use fewer modal constructions, employ fewer negotiation moves, solicit professor responses less explicitly, and show a lack of respect for or resistance to the authority of the instructor. This is likely having a negative impact on their studies. To gain a deeper understanding of why international students have such problems in e-mail communications, and to determine how they might develop their e-mail literacy, Chen conducted a longitudinal study of the e-mail practices of Taiwanese graduate students in the United States. Chen’s study focused on status-unequal e-mail communications in an academic context. The lone participant in the study was a young woman who earned a master’s degree in education and a Ph.D. in linguistics at a U.S. university. The data for the Chen study consisted of 168 e-mails that this young woman had sent to peers and 98 e-mails that she had sent to her professors during the two and a half years that she was studying in America.
Not surprisingly, many of the e-mails that she sent to her professors were inappropriate. The e-mail that she sent to her professors during her master’s studies were usually lengthy and included many unnecessary details, which suggests that she was not aware of the importance of being concise in such correspondence. These e-mails also showed that she used “Want Statements” (e.g., I want/need/hope you….) more frequently than “Query Preparatory Statements” (e.g., Can/could/would you. . . ) when making requests. Chen points out that these “Want Statements” and her frequent use of the word help likely gave her professors a negative image of her. In the U.S. academic culture, it is more appropriate for graduate students to demonstrate independence and confidence.
Chen noticed that the e-mails of this young woman changed considerably over her period of academic studies. After two years of study in the United States, her academic e-mails became shorter and more task-oriented and contained fewer “Want Statements” and more “Query Preparatory Statements.” Chen believes that these changes were attributable to the implicit learning that she obtained through interaction with native speakers and also to her new identity as a doctorial student.
In the conclusion to her study, Chen proposes that second language learners receive explicit instruction in email communication with professors and other people of high rank. I agree with Chen. Without explicit training in e-mail communications, international students with large vocabularies and a strong knowledge of English grammar will often have difficulty in composing appropriate e-mails to professors. These students need to be taught the norms and values that are expected of students in the American academic environment. They also need to develop mastery of the style of academic e-mails. ESL programs for prospective college students should address this issue by providing a unit of instruction on e-mail communications.
Joann
Synthesis Exercise & teaching assignment
I have been a tech-averse person my entire life. Thus, I have very little knowledge of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and have little experience in using them. Thus, at this point I don’t feel competent in discussing “technology-enriched learning activities and teaching practices that would maximize learning for the kinds of students entering higher education….” For this Synthesis Exercise, therefore, I would like to talk about my opinion of the pedagogical potential of technological resources in learning the vocabulary of a second language (L2). The primary goal of L2 learners is the development of communicative competence in the target language, which is possible only when they acquire a large enough vocabulary to express themselves, and I believe that the teaching and learning of vocabulary can be greatly enhanced by using computerized corpora such as the British National Corpus, which contains over 100 million words; the Michigan corpus, which is specialized for academic spoken English, and the COBUILD bank of English, which contains over 330 million words.
Today everyone in the world is writing to everyone else, keeping in touch and doing business across every border and time zone, and English is the lingua franca of written communication in cyberspace. Thus, the extent to which ESL students can be active participants in the various networks on the web is to a great extent determined by their communicative skills with written English. The importance of textual literacy is mentioned in a paper by Henry Jenkins et al. I think that ESL courses can enhance students’ textual literacy by increasing their vocabulary, teaching them how to use words appropriately, and educating them about norms and values in an English-speaking environment.
With regard to our teaching assignment, I am thinking about computer-assisted vocabulary learning or a media literacy program for ESL students. Right now I have only some vague ideas concerning both of these issues, and need to do some research before deciding on the subject for my teaching session.
Joann
#1. Introduction to the journal that I chose for this course
Based on my personal experience as a student of English as a second language (ESL), I would say that technology was not very helpful in my studying. Some cassette tapes, CDs, and some English learning software such as Rosetta Stone were used in my English classes in high school and college. These materials were viewed as employing cutting-edge technologies at that time, but I doubt that they provided much of an advantage in my learning English. I am now a graduate student at GMU in a program for ESL teachers. Over the last several years, I have given a lot of thought on how to teach ESL effectively but given little or no thought to the role of technology in my own teaching. I would guess that there are certain methods of teaching a second language that might be helped by the use of technologies. For example, technology can be used to facilitate language teaching in a classroom that adopts the Audiolingual method, which focuses oral drilling of sentence and phrase patterns, or Suggestopedia, which relies on baroque largo music to create a relaxed state of receptiveness to second language learning. But it has been shown that the learning outcomes produced by the Audiolingual method and Suggestopedia fall short of expectations, and these two methods are not employed in today’s language classroom. So I conclude that technology has had only a small influence on ESL teaching and that the primary ingredients for effective teaching are talent, passion, and knowledge of the teacher.
However, the assigned readings for our course and our seminars have caused me to rethink my ideas on technology as it relates to language education. If the information and communications technologies are inextricably intertwined with our daily life, as mentioned in class discussion, they must have influences on second language learning and teaching in some ways. First, technology provides access to a variety of target language input, which is regarded as the driving force of second language acquisition. A great number of resources in different languages are available on the internet, and learners can obtain access to authentic audio and/or visual materials. They can also contact native speakers of the target language through e-mail and online chat. Second, if learners expose themselves to large amount of and great variety of language input via current technology, language learning and teaching is no longer restricted to linguistic aspects. In my opinion, social and cultural aspects should be included as components of language education so that learners can prepare themselves for dealing with the social interactions via information and communication technologies that could be a critical source of input in the language learning process. And third, practitioners of language teaching need to be knowledgeable about how technology can be used to enhance language education. I chose Language Learning & Technology as my journal to explore because I found some articles that are related to what I mentioned above in this paragraph.
Language Learning & Technology is a refereed journal that focuses on issues related to language learning and language teaching, and how they are affected or enhanced by the use of technologies. The firs issue was published in 1997. The journal is currently published three times per year on the web. The issues of the journal that most interest me are those that examine ESL learners’ communicative competence that allows them to engage actively in today’s participatory culture and effectiveness of technology applied to language learning. The articles on my reading list include “The Development of E-mail Literacy: from Writing to Peers to Writing to Authority Figures,” “Collaborative E-mail Exchange for Teaching Secondary ESL,” “The Internet As a Global Discourse Environment,” “Computer Assisted Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition,” and “The Impact of Call Instruction on Classroom Computer Use.” I hope that these articles of my interests do not overlap with my peers who chose the same journal.
Joann
I have a Masters Degree from the School of Public Policy that focuses on International Commerce. International Commerce has been propelled by the winds of globalization. During the last two decades, globalization has proven to be a formidable force in shaping world trade and commerce. Nations’ desire to open new markets and increase commerce among them and other nations has created new necessities in education to help provide educational foundation that supports this new global interaction. It is my view that globalization of international commerce will be enhanced when educational institutions provide and require its students to have a global education.
Global education supports and nurtures the views of collaboration among educators, stakeholders as well as encourages cultural and ethnic sensitivity, coordination and critical thinking. It instills in us the respect and appreciation of other cultures and the importance to accept and respect the diverse pictures and cultures we continuously interact with. Furthermore, global education expands our views and encourages us to see the world as interconnected where actions we take or do not take will have effects on others who share this planet with us.
Global Education success is best measured when it includes elements that help individuals have a better understanding of the world we live in as it continues to redefine itself and adjusts our understanding of ourselves, our cultures and our interconnectivities. This continuous change requires individuals to update their knowledge and keep involved with an environment that encourages life long learning.
My interest in distant learning is its ability to represent a fundamental component of a successful international global education. A coherent distant education programs that cultivates collaboration, supports learning communities, keeps up with the changes in the economic, social and technological characteristics of the world we live in today will support the development of an international global educational program that produces global citizens. It is important that users of distant learning schemes view it as effective method to support elements of significant learning that propagate life long learning.
Distant learning schemes are best utilized when the courses they cover are designed a learner centered rather than topic centered. This design approach addresses the needs of the learner and enhances the educational outcomes.
I have chosen the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning because I believe it will provide me with articles that will help me present distant learning as an effective method to support the needs of global education. Understanding who to insure the effectiveness of distant learning is very important to encourage continued support of such an important tool to propagate global education.
The Journal has been in publication since January 2004. It covers innovation and in teaching to coordinate “collaboration among researcher, innovators, designers,…” while addressing issues that supports and enhances the utilization of distant learning methods. This Journal is refereed by its editorial board who insure that what gets published has been vetted and scrutinized by other scholars to ensure that what is published is will meet the minimum standards to achieve the goals of the journal. This is best reflected with the large following of readers that have downloaded from this Journal.
My review of articles in this journal will help me argue how to make distant learning more effective in supporting global education.
Hanan Alkibsi