Elaine Riordan

Tracing the Reflective Practices of Student Teachers in Online Modes.

During the course of pre- and in-service teacher education programmes, reflection can happen in a number of ways, for example: reflective journals, personal stories and pair/group co-operative discussions, professional development portfolios, and blogs and electronic portfolios. The aim of this paper is to examine various technologies such as online chat, discussion forums and blogs, in terms of their suitability and affordances as reflective media. It begins by examining positional survey data gathered from student teachers (STs) who have used these social media over a period of time. Following this it focuses on one of the desired outcomes of Reflective Practice (RP), the construction of teacher identity as part of the process of becoming a professional. The construction of identity through the mediational tool of language used across these modes is examined through a corpus linguistics lens. Collections of language produced around RP activities are analysed as a corpus in quantitative and qualitative ways. These complementary sources of data in a mixed-methods approach provide some insights into the technologies and their potential in a Language Teacher Education (LTE) context. To this end, our findings suggest that blogs, in particular, foster narration, RP and the expression of identities, while chat and forums promote emotional and affective engagement, all of which can be useful to STs at the initial and continuing stages of their career.

A corpus‐based analysis of online synchronous and asynchronous modes of communication within language teacher education

Current technologies are affording more varied types of communication and collaboration than has ever before been possible, and many disciplines are beginning to exploit these technologies, with language teacher education (LTE) being one such discipline. Several researchers have explored synchronous and asynchronous online communication and their uses and benefits within different pedagogical contexts. Adding to this field of work, this paper provides a corpus‐based analysis of virtual synchronous and asynchronous student teacher and peer mentor interactions, highlighting the pertinent issues of interactivity and reflection. Variation and similarities between both modes are considered and compared against larger spoken and written corpora to investigate if either mode appears more akin to the spoken or written media. The paper closes with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of such research findings for the teacher education arena.

Students’ engagement in reflective tasks: an investigation of interactive and non-interactive discourse corpora

Reflective learning, a practice carrying relatively high educational value, has been with us for some time. Its popularity has grown to the extent that it is often adopted unquestioningly by educational practitioners. However, there are some important questions to be asked in relation to reflective practice. In reality, its impact on improved and enhanced learning and practice, and ultimately its educational value, cannot be known without further examination, research and consideration. This paper uses evidence from a range of spoken and written corpora to gain some insights into the discourse of reflectivity as it is used by students and educators. The data, collected in a third-level educational context, involve students performing tasks widely believed to promote reflection. The spoken data come from student teachers discussing practice language lessons and their general studies, and the written data come in the form of student essays, online blogs and online discussions from student teachers, language students, and computer science multi-media gaming students. The corpora are firstly examined for engagement in reflection using levels of contribution and interactivity (quantitatively measured through word counts and utterance length). Secondly, comparative frequency lists are used to generate key lexical items (verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns) suggestive of reflective discourse. The analyses suggest that the amount and type of reflection is influenced by the discourse mode, the task, the participants and power dynamics. Ultimately, the objective of this paper is to take a first step towards suggesting a more tangible framework for examining the relatively elusive practice of reflection for educational purposes. In an attempt to do this, it raises some questions and generates further hypotheses for follow-up research investigation.

Sharing and collaborating between an online community of novice teachers: CMC in language teacher education

New and emerging technologies have transformed the classroom (Mishra and Koehler, 2006) and continue to do so, and it has been reported that teachers and teacher educators now work in ever evolving environments (Elliott, 2009). Research indicates that varied forms of CMC can be implemented to foster collaborative and social learning (Arnold and Ducate, 2006), and the formation of communities of practice (CoPs) (Arnold et al., 2005). Therefore, this paper investigates the implementation of online and face-to-face (F2F) communication in an English Language Teaching (ELT) teacher education programme, with the aim of illuminating the potential such modes have for sharing and collaborating, for providing a space for situated learning and open communication. Results are analysed using a corpus-based methodology, drawing on three aspects of community membership, namely a joint enterprise, mutual engagement and a shared repertoire (Wenger, 1998). This paper closes with a discussion of the implications of such data for Language Teacher Education (LTE) in a technologically-oriented world.