EFL – Neil Cowie

Week 3: Exploring Learning, Teaching & Assessment

1. An understanding of teaching, learning and/or assessment processes

I am not teaching at the moment as the new school year does not start until the beginning of April. Therefore, I will try and describe an assessment from a previous course. I mentioned in the Week 2 post about Operational Issues that my school does not have a lot of technology available to support staff or students; there is no LMS for example, and Wi-Fi has only recently been installed. As a result, I encourage students to use free software tools outside of lessons (see Cowie & Sakui, 2015, 2018).

One course I teach is for second-year students who have to take a compulsory English course twice a week for 8 weeks. They are from various faculties such as science, engineering, and environmental science. Many of them are very switched off foreign languages and do not want to take part actively in lessons – therefore using technology is a way to engage their interest without pressuring them too much to ‘perform’. I get them to produce four Powerpoint slide presentations with audio that they upload to YouTube and share on Google Community (I previously used Brainshark but this software was phased out).

Students view each other’s slideshows and complete a rubric. The rubric was created by first brainstorming ideas on Padlet (see screenshot below) and guiding the students to develop various criteria and levels of performance (see Cowie & Sakui 2016). In this way, I think that the students were encouraged to consider important features of a presentation which they could use in their own work. In theory, at least, the goals and outcomes of the course could be ‘constructively aligned’ (Biggs & Tang, 2007).

I collect the rubrics using a survey on Google Forms. In addition, I give comments to each student on Google Community (see two examples below). These generally correspond to each feature of the rubric and are formative rather than summative. I don’t give any grades online.

2. An understanding of your target learners

As mentioned above my target learners in this example are from various faculties. They may be very good at their special subject but they are often not at a high level in English, particularly in terms of speaking and listening and skills. They do, however, like to research about their own interests (e.g., robots, car engines, soil pollution) and so I encourage them to create multimedia presentations on these kinds of topics. Very often they have never used PowerPoint or any of the Google tools so I have to teach them. I do that using videos I make myself and post on YouTube.

I would like the students to use English to discuss, brainstorm and plan their projects but many of them are just not at a level where they can do this. Instead, I make two of the four projects collaborative so they have to work with a partner(s) using shared Google Slides. Again, this is new for most of them and is a motivating technological tool based on constructivist approaches to learning in general (Vygotsky, 1978) and task-based learning in EFL in particular (Ellis, 2003)

Reflection

I think it is very good that students could have some input into their own rubric although I think this works better with students at a relatively higher level of English. Google Community is a nice alternative to an LMS but it doesn’t have the option of collating student input in any easy way so using it as a tool for assessment is quite tedious. Collecting data on Google Forms is a lot easier and you can easily make a spreadsheet with student-generated data.

The projects themselves were often very good. It is not always fun to look at another teacher’s student’s work but here are two that give a flavour of the work:

a. This is a slightly humorous advice video on how to take a train in Japan. I showed it to my brother (from the UK) who was visiting and found it useful:

b. One from an agriculture student presenting about ‘supercows’

References

Biggs, J. B., & Tang, C. (2007). Teaching for Quality Learning at University (3rd ed.). Maidenhead: McGraw Hill Education & Open University Press.

Cowie, N., & Sakui, K. (2015). Assessment and e-learning: Current issues and future trends. The JALT CALL Journal, 11, 3, 271-281.

Cowie, N., & Sakui, K. (2016). The use of rubrics for the assessment of digital products in language learning. In M. Iguchi & L. Yoffe (Eds.) Mobile learning in and out of the classroom: Balancing blended language learner training (pp. 12-17). Proceedings of The 42nd (2015) JACET Summer Seminar. The Japan Association of College English Teachers.

Cowie, N. & Sakui, K. (2018). Learning English through digital projects: A Japanese university case study. Osaka JALT Journal, 5, 20-43.

Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford, New York: Oxford Applied Linguistics.

Vygotsky, L (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Week 2: Operational Issues

1. Constraints and benefits

I teach English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at Okayama University in Japan. It is called a ‘national university’ which means it is a publicly funded institution that gets its money from student fees and government support. The fees are lower than private universities. I say this because many people’s image of Japan is that it is a very high-tech place and that if you’re working in a university there it must be state-of-the-art with lots of great equipment. The reality is that, as a percentage of GDP, Japan’s spending on education is low and many higher education institutions are poorly resourced. For example, it is only in the last couple of years that Wi-Fi has been installed; there is no LMS and ‘Blackboard’ is literally a blackboard with chalk.

In such circumstances, I have used digital technology that is free for students and that they can use outside of the classroom. Examples of this include: Google Docs and Slides to make collaborative multimedia projects, Padlet for brainstorming and sharing ideas, Google Community as a kind of LMS for classes; creating Wikipedia pages for writing practice; and, Quizlet for vocabulary development. For colleagues, I created a WordPress site to share information about the curriculum, teaching approaches and so on.

Screenshot of an archived page from a teacher website

2. Technical Knowledge

I feel that my technical knowledge is limited to being a ‘visitor’ to the tools that I use and share with students but I haven’t left much trace behind me. One exception to that was my use of Google Plus as a makeshift LMS – students would post their projects (usually videos and slideshows) to the class community and give comments to each other. I would also give feedback to the students on their projects using the comment function. The screenshot below shows some of the class communities made using Google Plus.

3. Deployment of learning technology

As a result of the rather limited opportunities at university to use learning technology coupled with the desire to try and develop further skills I have developed (with my partner, Keiko Sakui) online courses using the Udemy platform. We use Keynote and iMovie to make videos that are mixture of slide shows, embedded talking heads, and animation. Since 2017, we have made three courses on English and communication (grammar, small talk and meetings). We have over 500 students that have signed up from 35 countries. Perhaps the main challenge, other than how to use the various software and understanding audio/video recording, has been how to structure the courses to maintain student motivation. We never meet the students face to face and the Udemy ecology provides limited communication opportunities for feedback. This means that we have tried a number of techniques so that motivation is maximised in the course itself. This was the topic of a presentation we made at SoTEL 2019 (which led to me taking this CMALT course).

Week 1: Contextual Statement

In the video below I explain why I am interested in digital technology for education (it involves a short story about a broken leg) and the context in which I teach (Okayama University in Japan).

Other information

My partner (in life and for research), Keiko Sakui and I have written a book chapter on how we learned about the use of technology for education. It is a kind of extended contextual statement so if you have time and energy you can read it here.

There is also a slideshow on the same topic that I made for a EUROCALL conference that you can view here. I gave the presentation on my own but there are some inserted videos with Keiko talking.

References

Sakui, K., & Cowie, N. (forthcoming). Language teacher learning in Japan: Joining a digital technology community of practice. In Y. Kimura, L. Yang & T-Y Kim (Eds.) Teacher Motivation, Autonomy, Development in the Far East. New York: Springer Publishing Company.

Cowie, N. (August 23rd, 2017). EFL teacher learning in Japan: Joining a digital community of practice. Presentation at the EUROCALL Annual Conference. Southampton University, Southampton, UK.