CALL teacher education for tomorrow's world: designing courses for future teaching contextsEuroCALL Teacher Education SIG Symposium EuroCALL 2014, Groningen Thursday 21 August, 15:45-17:15, A900

Designing teacher education courses for future CALL teaching contexts

Organisers: Shona Whyte and Euline Cutrim Schmid (co-chairs of Teacher Education SIG)

Technologies are transforming language learning and teaching in classroom, distance, blended and mobile learning situations, and seem set to continue to do in ways which are hard to anticipate. Learning opportunities are expanding, but in many contexts teaching methodologies fail to keep pace. The symposium brings together research from Finland, France and Ireland on novice and experienced language teachers in schools and universities to ask how CALL teachers respond to these challenges and how they may best be prepared for further change.

Papers

Course design for pre-service secondary teachers: collaboration and reflection in a short, multilingual CALL course!Shona Whyte, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis!!Current and imagined practices: language students and teachers making sense of CALL tomorrow!Leene Kuure, Tuomo Koivisto, Maritta Riekki; University of Oulu, Finland!!Learning to teach for the future: a careful blend of action and reflection!Muriel Grosbois & Cédric Sarré, ESPE Paris!!Continuous Professional Development through Reflective Practice for Experienced TESOL Professionals: the place of off and on-line activities!Fiona Farr & Elaine Riordan, University of Limerick!

Course design for pre-service secondary teachers: collaboration and reflection in a short, multilingual CALL course

Shona WhyteUniversité Nice Sophia Antipolis, France

CALL courses for novice language teachers should cover techno-pedagogical competences and future professional development requirements, but while integrated approaches applied across the curriculum are frequently advocated (Hubbard & Levy, 2006; Kessler, 2006), institutional constraints may favour stand-alone modules. This study investigates pre-service teachers of various L2s in a short CALL course at a French university. It examines the extent to which constructivist principles can inform effective course design, and how teachers can acquire techno-pedagogical skills, filter online content, and work collaboratively in the light of ongoing teaching practice. Data include blogs, wikis, and social media use, as well as reflective comments; analysis focuses on the process and products of this form of CALL teacher education.

Current and imagined practices: language students and teachers making sense of CALL tomorrow

Leene Kuure, Tuomo Koivisto, Maritta Riekki University of Oulu, Finland

Affordances for (inter)action provided by technology are today abundant and rhizomatic, providing a multilingual “habitat” for people from an early age. (e.g., Pachler, Cook & Bachmair, 2010). Pedagogic practices need to change and teacher education needs to support language students in entering the transforming field with new kinds of professional expertise. Change seems difficult, however, and there are still great differences between schools as for CALL resources available and pedagogic practices (Häkkinen & Hämäläinen, 2012). This paper discusses efforts in facilitating pre-service teachers’ sense-making in relation to the CALL of the future, and includes the perspectives of teachers in the field, using nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004) and multiple types of data from university courses for language students and teachers with their pupils.

Learning to teach for the future: a careful blend of action and reflection

Muriel Grosbois & Cédric SarréESPE Paris, France

To integrate ever-evolving technologies to foster L2 development, pre-service teachers need to reflect upon CALL's added value while designing and implementing pedagogically relevant activities (Bertin & Narcy-Combes, 2007). Often both "digital immigrants" and novices in pedagogy, unable even to draw on personal language learning experience with technologies, they do learn early in their careers that digital practice is not a mere add-on to pedagogical practice. In this study pre-service EFL teachers participate in action and reflection-based ICT projects - computer supported collaborative writing, and online tutoring - to develop competences likely to be beneficial for their students and themselves. Since no "recipe" can possibly be applied, combining action and reflection may help pre-service teachers be creative, flexible, and open-minded: agents of change for tomorrow’s world.

Continuous Professional Development through Reflective Practice for Experienced TESOL Professionals: the place of off and on-line activities

Fiona Farr & Elaine RiordanUniversity of Limerick, Eire

This paper explores the impact of Reflective Practice (RP) with a group of experienced ELT professionals from a range of international contexts following a structured PhD programme in TESOL. In an RP module teachers revisit their professional reflective practices in a semi-structured learning environment (cf Zwozdiak-Myers, 2012). A corpus of group discussions, reflective blogs and e-portfolios is investigated quantitatively and qualitatively using corpus analysis software and discourse analysis frameworks, providing evidence from experienced teachers on reflective beliefs and practices.