Nicolas Guichon

Training future language teachers to develop online tutors’ competence through reflective analysis

This article sets out to identify key competencies which language tutors need to develop in order to manage synchronous online teaching. In order to aptly monitor interactions with distant learners, it is proposed that three types of regulation pertaining to socio-affective, pedagogical and multimedia aspects are required. On the one hand, this research aims at specifying these competencies and, on the other hand, it seeks to identify the relevance of reflective analysis for professional development. The context of this study is a teacher training programme for Masters Degree students in teaching French as a foreign language that provides trainees with the opportunity of teaching online to intermediate-level students of French from a North American university via a desktop videoconferencing platform. This programme first endeavours to put trainees in a professional situation by getting them to prepare and administer sessions in order to confront them with the specific challenges of synchronous online tutoring. Second, it seeks to help them to gain insight into their own activity by developing critical thinking towards their own practice. The data elicited for this research derive from the tutor trainees’ interpretations of their own practice when confronted with the film of their own situated activity. The episodes chosen by the trainees to feed the self-confrontation process constitute significant units because by being told and commented upon, they elucidate how and to what extent competencies are built. Three discursive strategies have been identified and used to organise the content analysis of the data: description; expression of a difficulty; reflective review of the activity. The strategies used by trainees to verbalise their own activity can inform teacher educators about the constraints of the work situation and about the resources trainees need to deploy to face up to this unknown professional situation. Results indicate that trainees concentrate particularly on pedagogical aspects that distance and faulty technology have rendered complex. The encountered difficulties are equally distributed between a repertoire of competencies pertaining to language teaching and competencies more directly linked with online teaching. Finally, this study has enabled us to assess the potential of self-confrontation for teacher practice and leads us to propose directions for improving this training device.

The use of the webcam for teaching a foreign language in a desktop videoconferencing environment

This paper explores how language teachers learn to teach with a synchronous multimodal setup (Skype), and it focuses on their use of the webcam during the pedagogical interaction. First, we analyze the ways that French graduate students learning to teach online use the multimodal resources available in a desktop videoconferencing (DVC) environment to monitor pedagogical interactions with intermediate level learners of French in a North-American university. Then, we examine communicational and pedagogical aspects of this process which involves orchestrating different modalities and deploying various regulations for “semio-pedagogical” purposes. We define semio-pedagogical skills as the capacity to mediate a pedagogical interaction by combining or dissociating modalities (written, oral, and/or video) that are adapted to objectives and to the cognitive requisites of the task. We posit that these skills have to become part of the professional repertoire of future teachers, as they will increasingly be required to exploit the multimodal potentialities of online communication in their teaching. The study draws on screen capture recordings of teacher trainee-student interactions and is completed by semi-directive interviews with teacher trainees (n = 5). It aims (1) to identify the importance of webcamming in the share of the pedagogical range available to teachers and (2) analyze the non verbal dimension of pedagogical communication via DVC. The outcome of this study is the identification of five degrees of utilization of the webcam medium: there a certain gradation in the way webcamming is used (with a more or less significant use of image) when compared to other modalities. The different uses that are identified vary according to the perceived usefulness of webcamming to monitor teaching and to the teacher trainees’ capacity to manage different workspaces.

Editorial: Teacher education research in call and cmc: more in demand than ever

At the EUROCALL conference 2009 in Gandia we, the editors of this special issue decided to blow a breath of fresh air into the Special Interest Group for Teacher Education and were overwhelmed by the response we received during the initial meeting. One of the outcomes was the decision to organise a smaller, in between type of research seminar for those among us who are involved – both as practitioners as well as researchers – in CALL and CMC-based language teaching. Another decision was that the event should have a narrower focus than the much wider themes of the annual EUROCALL conferences. In May 2010, then, the “European workshop on teacher education in CALL: towards a research agenda”, a 2 ½ day event, took place at the Institut National de Recherche Pedagogique (INRP) in Lyon. It provided the opportunity to exchange experiences and catch up with developments in the field in a convivial atmosphere and served as a springboard for setting up new research partnerships among participants. The workshop was followed by a call for contributions to an issue of ReCALL on “CALL and CMC Teacher Education research: enduring questions, emerging methodologies”. Four out of the six contributions in this issue are from colleagues who gave presentations in Lyon, and two were selected from other submissions that were received. We hope that you will find the articles as insightful and thought-provoking as the reviewers and we did and would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the scientific committee for their support. Most of them also served as reviewers for this special issue. While the use of digital technologies in language education has been growing over the last 15 years, pedagogical developments and methodological reflection have hardly kept pace. Unsurprisingly, teacher training continues to feature high on the CALL research agenda and there is increasing interest in dedicated events such as the Lyon workshop, or the one held this year in collaboration with EUROCALL’s CMC SIG at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. The ensuing publications such as this collection as well as other recent volumes and articles (see, for example, Dooly, 2009; Guichon, 2009; Hampel, 2009; Hauck & Stickler 2006; Hong 2010; Hubbard & Levy, 2006; Kassen et al. 2008; Stockwell, 2009) bear witness to this development. As Stockwell (2009: 1) observes and Cutrim Schmid (this issue) quite rightly reminds us “[t]his attention is indicative of greater recognition of the importance of CALL practitioners having sufficient grounding in CALL theory and practice, as well as knowledge of what technologies are available to them in order to be able to effectively implement CALL in their specific language learning environments”. In what follows we attempt to address enduring questions in research on teacher education for CALL and CMC-based language learning and a variety of methodological approaches, both traditional and emerging. The contributions explore issues relevant for both novice and experienced colleagues when embarking on teaching languages with information and communication technologies (ICTs) both in more traditional classroom settings as well as in online only contexts. We believe that insights gained from both these perspectives can inform and enrich current and future research endeavours and teaching practice. For the sake of clarity, we will use teacher to refer to classroom teaching and tutor to refer to online teaching even though this distinction poses epistemological issues.

Managing Written and Oral Negative Feedback in a Synchronous Online Teaching Situation.

This case study focuses on the feedback that is provided by tutors to learners in the course of synchronous online teaching. More specifically, we study how trainee tutors used the affordances of Visu, an experimental web videoconferencing system, to provide negative feedback. Visu features classical functionalities such as video and chat, and it also offers a unique marking tool that allows tutors to take time-coded notes during the online interactions for later pedagogical remediation. Our study shows that tutors mainly use verbal and chat feedback, with significant inter-individual variability, and that tutors who provide verbal feedback are more likely to use markers. Marking takes time because of the dual task that it entails for the tutor. Idiosyncratic strategies in the use of markers are evidenced. These results clearly show the value of markers for negative feedback, signal the need for their explicitness, and also call for an evolution of the Visu interface so that tutors can better negotiate the task of online tutoring and the pedagogical stance they have to take on in their interactions with the learners.

A semiotic perspective on webconferencing-supported language teaching.

In webconferencing-supported teaching, the webcam mediates and organizes the pedagogical interaction. Previous research has provided a mixed picture of the use of the webcam: while it is seen as a useful medium to contribute to the personalization of the interlocutors’ relationship, help regulate interaction and facilitate learner comprehension and involvement, the limited access to visual cues provided by the webcam is felt as useless or even disruptive. This study examines the meaning-making potential of the webcam in pedagogical interactions from a semiotic perspective by exploring how trainee teachers use the affordances of the webcam to produce non-verbal cues that may be useful for mutual comprehension. The research context is a telecollaborative project where trainee teachers of French as a foreign language met for online sessions in French with undergraduate Business students at an Irish university. Using multimodal transcriptions of the interaction data from these sessions, screen shot data, and students’ post-course interviews, it was found, firstly, that whilst a head and shoulders framing shot was favoured by the trainee teachers, there does not appear to be an optimal framing choice for desktop videoconferencing among the three framing types identified. Secondly, there was a loss between the number of gestures performed by the trainee teachers and those that were visible for the students. Thirdly, when trainee teachers were able to coordinate the audio and kinesic modalities, communicative gestures that were framed, and held long enough to be perceived by the learners, were more likely to be valuable for mutual comprehension. The study highlights the need for trainee teachers to develop critical semiotic awareness to gain a better perception of the image they project of themselves in order to actualise the potential of the webcam and add more relief to their online teacher presence.

From the development of online resources to their local appropriation: a case study

Sharing resources questions the capacity of different institutions to collaborate in a meaningful way. Different steps in the sharing process are to be taken into account as we contend that teaching resources, despite their intrinsic qualities, can remain unexploited otherwise. The present contribution proposes to study both the development of online resources, the challenges that are posed once the created resources are meant to be used by partner institutions, and the ways they can be integrated into the local contexts, It aims at understanding the process involved in an online learning environment designed for the learning of English, originally created for a specific local audience, and ultimately replicated in several universities. We will distinguish phases to be respected for a successful sharing experience, during the development and appropriation phases, in order to favour the dissemination of innovation in a university context.

Outils numériques nomades : les effets sur l’attention des étudiants

La recherche sur le numerique en education est parvenue a une etape ou peut etre dresse un portrait plus nuance des usages des outils numeriques en contexte d’apprentissage. S’inscrivant dans une perspective sociocritique (Selwyn, 2007), cet article vise a apprecier les effets eventuellement negatifs resultant de l’utilisation des outils numeriques nomades pendant le face-a-face didactique. Une enquete par questionnaire a ete conduite aupres d’un echantillon d’etudiants internationaux (n=227) poursuivant leurs etudes dans un Centre de Langues en France. Cette recherche a permis d’examiner leurs habitudes de connexion en mettant au jour la frequence et la motivation d’utilisation d’outils numeriques pendant et hors le face-a-face avec leurs enseignants. Elle a egalement donne l’occasion de saisir l’impact ressenti de l’utilisation des outils numeriques en classe par les participants sur leur attention. Les resultats de cette recherche permettent, in fine, d’examiner de quelle facon le contrat didactique est questionne par l’usage des outils numeriques nomades.