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- Bradley, Linda, 1961
(författare)
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Language learning and technology. Student activities in web-based environments
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The impact of the web as a communicative arena, based on the use of social software, has changed conditions for communication on all levels of society; privately, at work and in education. This has opened up for multicultural communication, frequently with English as the lingua franca. Exploring how the web and web-based technologies afford learning activities is something that is related to practical and theoretical interests in the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). These interests are also the foundation for this thesis. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of how web-based environments can change the conditions for language learning. Within a socio-cultural framework, the thesis explores activities and student interaction in web-based learning environments in language learning for engineering students in higher education in Sweden. The main research question is how web-based language learning activities contribute to the development of language competences. There are four more specific questions: How are web-based technologies situated in language learning environments? What forms of activities and student interaction evolve? How can web-based peer reviewing contribute to language learning? How can intercultural exchanges contribute to language learning? The empirical foundation of the thesis comprises four case studies of educational designs including student activities in blogs and wikis. Data consists of logs of student driven web-based activities and interviews. The first study investigates how students use a wiki as their joint workspace. The results show that the students either use the web page or the discussion forum on the wiki, entailing both a form-based and a content-based focus. Three types of activity patterns emerge: contributing and writing together; evaluating and peer reviewing; and arguing and discussing. The second study explores rationalities of student co-production of texts on a wiki. The patterns of interaction in groups can be characterized either as co-operation or collaboration. The results show that the collaborating groups are more frequent in giving peer response. When writing together,collaboration with contributions from diverse perspectives changes the dynamics not only of text production but the text in itself. This has potential for language learning since the students become involved in many levels of text production, from very detailed linguistic aspects to discursive and semantic aspects. The third study investigates student interaction in a poetry blog exchange with native-English speaking students from the US. In the blogging activity, the students share their interpretation of poems by a Swedish poet. The analysis of the blog postings uncovers four themes of student interaction: blogging in an educational environment; displaying cultural belonging; forming threads that thematize content and meaning of poems; and discussions of language and translation issues in an intercultural environment. Study four investigates an intercultural exchange, targeting student peer-reviewing in a wiki. The procedure of giving comments to and receiving comments from peer students from another culture offers diversity to text revision processes. Being engaged in an intercultural peer review exchange offers opportunities in getting an insight into different ways of expression, conditions of giving and receiving feedback, cultural differences when meeting someone from outside of one’s own disciplinary field and from another country and with another language background. This is in line with core issues of intercultural exchanges that concern mastering expressions of other cultures than one’s own. The four studies contribute to the understanding of how web-based environments can be used in language learning. They display a range of productive student interaction such as discussing, collaborating, and responding through text. In conclusion, they demonstrate that educational designs utilizing web-based writing technologies offer a space to develop discursive, linguistic and cultural competences.
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- Eriksson, Ann-Marie, 1964
(författare)
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Formulating knowledge: Engaging with issues of sustainable development through academic writing in engineering education
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Given that knowledge in society is increasingly shaped by textuality and dependent on texts, higher education holds a special responsibility for introducing and guiding students into text practices contingent on disciplinary fields and their knowledge traditions. On a general level, this doctoral thesis investigates how participation in such text practices at university functions as a means for engaging students with knowledge that is new to them. Two aims have been pursued across three empirical studies in the setting of supervision of an academic writing assignment in engineering education. First, the thesis aims at illuminating challenges involved as students and teachers are engaging with knowledge through text practices. Second, the thesis aims at making visible what communicative work such challenges entail. The empirical material comprises video recorded supervision sessions where sequential drafts of an academic writing assignment on issues of sustainable development are being discussed. Given the sociocultural and dialogical perspective this thesis is grounded in, text production is understood as a mediating activity and a process of gradual appropriation of disciplinary practices. Methodologically, such premises imply a detailed investigation of text production as practical work, empirically analysed as interactional, communicative processes and from the participants’ perspective. The studies have provided insights into three salient challenges in this type of text production. Study 1 addresses the problem of how supervisionprovides a site for taking initial steps into a disciplinary field and its knowledge traditions. Study 2 focuses on referencing as a contextualizing and recontextualizing practice where knowledge of a field needs to be transformed for new purposes. Study 3 addresses challenges involved in grounding conclusions in alignment with a particular knowledge field. The analyses show that formulating knowledge is a demanding process for both students and teachers. Writing a report on issues of sustainable development exemplify advanced practices that do not lend themselves to easy explanations and straightforward instruction. Dealing with specific matters about specific issues, negotiating alternative ways of formulating text and testing alternative solutions to specific textual problems seem to have the potential of guiding students into dialogue with a field. Based on the conclusion that this type of orientation seems to require time and recurrent encounters where gradually more concrete aspects of epistemic practices can be unfolded and experienced, it is argued that an orientation of this kind may be difficult to take on one’s own - especially for someone in the role of a student.
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