Blended teaching and the changing role of the

language tutor

Anna Comas-Quinn

Department of Languages

4 May 2012

• How does blended/online language teaching differ from traditional language teaching?

• How does language teaching at the OU differ from language teaching elsewhere?

What’s good about online teaching and learning?

…besides being able to do it in your pyjamas…

What’s good about ‘online’?

• Access to a wider range of views • Access to a larger pool of potential

communication partners• Time and location independent• Collaboration and community• …

“The supposed benefits of online interaction are just not obvious to many learners” (Goodfellow, 2007:6).

both teachers and learners need to know not only how to use new technologies but also why they should use them

(Kirkwood & Price, 2005).

Skills pyramid (Hampel & Stickler, 2005:312)

Pedagogical understanding

Is blogging a good thing for language learning….

if it’s not compulsory?

if not many students write on their blog?

if the teacher does not mark it?

• Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self System (Dörnyei, 2009): Ideal Self, Ought-To Self and Feared Self.

‘understanding how experienced language teachers engage with a new learning and teaching domain, and the ways in which they create, contribute to or resist opportunities for workplace learning’ (White & Ding,

2009:346).

• effective training must both destabilise teachers’ existing views of their role and identity and support them in building new perspectives which match the training outcomes (Kubanyiova, 2009). Wenger (1998) calls this ‘learning as becoming’.

• the learning process entails an element of identity formation as the teacher engages with the process in order to become ‘a certain person or to avoid becoming a certain person’ (Wenger, 1998:215).

“I am not convinced about the pedagogic value of blogs and revision exercises that are not properly marked”

‘the face to face mode is much better as learning a language is a lot to do with social interaction and communication’

What are the assumptions and underlying values?

• teachers’ willingness to change is powerfully influenced by learners’ expectations.

• the fear that ‘by adopting a new approach to teaching they would fail to meet the students’ expectations’ (Kubanyiova, 2009:326) particularly in a strongly learner-centred institution.

• teacher self and teacher identity > the core of teacher training

• easier for those who already aspire to become online teachers, but for those who do not see themselves as online teachers, the training has to persuade them of the value of online teaching and the desirability of becoming online teachers.

• Comas-Quinn, Anna (2011). Learning to teach online or learning to become an online teacher: an exploration of teachers' experiences in a blended learning course. ReCALL, 23(03), pp. 218–232. at http://oro.open.ac.uk/32111/

• Dörnyei, Z. (2009) ‘The L2 Motivational Self System’, in Dörnyei, Z and Ushioda, E (eds) Motivation, Language Identity and the L2 Self, Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

• Goodfellow (2007) Rethinking Educational Technologies in the Age of Social Media: from ‘tools for interaction’ to ‘sites of practice’ Keynote presentation for Echanger Pour Apprendre en Ligne (EPAL) conference, Universite Standhal, Grenoble, 9 June 2007. Available online at: http://w3.u-grenoble3.fr/epal/pdf/goodfellow.pdf (accessed 5 December 2007)

• Hampel, R. and Stickler, U. (2005) ‘New skills for new classrooms: Training tutors to teach languages online’, Computer Assisted Language Learning, 18 (4): 311-326.

• Kirkwood, A. and Price, L. (2005) ‘Learners and learning in the twenty-first century: what do we know about students’ attitudes towards and experiences of information and communication technologies that will help us design courses?’, Studies in Higher Education, 30 (3): 257-274.

• Kubanyiova, M. (2009) ‘Possible Selves in Language Teacher Development’, in Dörnyei, Z and Ushioda, E (eds) Motivation, Language Identity and the L2 Self, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 314-332.

• Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

• White, C. and Ding, A. (2009) ‘Identity and Self in E-Language Teaching’, in Dörnyei, Z and Ushioda, E (eds) Motivation, Language Identity and the L2 Self, Bristol, Multilingual Matters, 333-349.