To those for whom this title immediately conjures up some oxymoronic twist, this article might interest you… It’s hard to talk about social learning, online learning and all that stuff without evoking socio-constructivism. But as such a powerful pedagogical position in education today, is socio-constructivism more than simply a theory of learning? Often associated with… [Read more…]
March 26, 2012
Although research in the social sciences typically favors qualitative methods of inquiry, there have been many quantitative studies that have systematically analyzed teachers’ eliciting behavior by measuring the time between teachers asking a question and either rephrasing or answering the question themselves. It is now recognized that the pause is almost universally too short to… [Read more…]
March 12, 2012
In the last two centuries, knowledge has moved closer and closer to the human mind, starting off living somewhere ‘out there’ in early 19th Century objectivism, to moving somewhere between thought and experience in mid-20th Century pragmatism and finally finding a home as a purely internal construction with later interpretivism. Obviously, lines between various epistemologies… [Read more…]
February 27, 2012
The value of reading for pleasure (i.e. extensive reading), or what Krashen (1993) called “free voluntary reading,” in language learning cannot be overstated. Its benefits, compiled by Renandya and Jacobs (2002), include: enhanced language learning in such areas as spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and text structure increased knowledge of the world improved reading and writing skills… [Read more…]
February 8, 2012
As one poet so eloquently put it almost half a century ago, “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (Dylan, 1965). And this is truer today than it ever was, particularly in the field of education! Young people experience their educational years in a completely different environment than before. Digital technology is ubiquitous! Gadgets are almost and… [Read more…]
January 26, 2012
About two years ago, I was helping to organize a few days of teacher development where I worked (King Saud University in Riyadh, KSA). I had a few sessions to do myself but luckily, I got the chance to catch one of our guest speakers, Jim Scrivener, talk about Situational Presentations. I remember there being… [Read more…]
January 11, 2012
Or should we be asking the opposite… How many good ideas does it take to change teachers? Widespread advocacy for educational reform sparks debate in many areas, one of which is teacher education. We need to rethink not only how to prepare pre-service teachers for the challenges of educating a dynamic 21st century workforce, but… [Read more…]
December 27, 2011
A recent teacher training session of mine has got me thinking in more detail about classroom management and discipline. This is something that has always been quite natural to me; luckily in my teaching career I’ve never had discipline problems that have escalated too far up (except on one occasion). The key: The Teacher Persona… [Read more…]
December 19, 2011
Defining exactly what Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is can be a confusing endeavor… It seems many people have their own interpretations according to whether or not they are advocates of so-called strong CLT or weak CLT. To say the least, we know that CLT involves seeing language as means to communicate and learners as social… [Read more…]
December 11, 2011
Social learning is something I’ve been increasingly interested in… and inherent in this is the idea of Communities of Practice (CoPs). I was asked to explain the reasons for their sudden re-emergence in popular thought since the 1990s and here’s what I wrote… “Learning through participation in communities of practice is ubiquitous and can be… [Read more…]
|
May 4, 2012
3