Multimodal Text Analysis of ELT Classroom Discourse

?An Agent-Oriented Modeling Approach

顾曰国

北京外国语大学&

同济大学

What happens in ELT classroom in China? What counts as “good teaching”? What do students do while the teacher does the talking? What roles does ICT play in ELT classroom?

In order to empirically investigate into these issues, a lab-like classroom is specially set up at Tongji University, Shanghai, China, equipped with three cameras simultaneously video-taping the teacher, students, and the use of ICT. As of writing, over a hundred hour corpus of the video-taped data has been compiled.

This paper explores multimodal text analysis of such video stream data. ELAN is adopted as a tool for multiple-layered analysis.

An agent-oriented modeling and its metalanguage (AOM) is used for data-integration. It is hoped that the multimodal text analysis of such corpus will provide empirical evidence for seeking answers to the four questions raised above.

Establishing Virtual Communities of Practice for Teacher Professional Development—Challenges and Obstacles

Thang Siew Ming

环太平洋地区计算机辅助教学协会

Research on teacher learning has changed substantially due to shifts in the theoretical perspectives of learning that have impacted on how learning is viewed. The traditional Professional Development (PD) designs feature a top-down approach, passive learning which does not consider the context of learning.

The rapid advancement in technology has brought about massive changes to teaching and learning and has led to the development of what is known as Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoPs). Barab, MaKinster and Scheckler (2004) describe a VCoP as “a persistent, sustained [socio-technical] network of individuals who share and develop an overlapping knowledge base, set of beliefs, values, history and experiences focused on a common practice and/or mutual enterprise” (p. 23).

This paper will first review research projects that concentrate on the establishment of VCoPs in the West and in the East to determine the challenges and obstacles encountered. It will then attempt to identify factors essential for the success of such projects taking into consideration situational, environmental, cultural and technical variations. Then it will proceed to describe a research project undertaken in Malaysia to promote VCoPs among Malaysian Smart schools teachers of English, Science and Mathematics. The challenges and obstacles of implementing such communities will be discussed and compared to efforts in other contexts and suggestions on how to move things forward shared.