Risk Taking By Chinese Second Language Learners Of English On An International Foundation Course At A British University

Author : Xueyan Sherry Duan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (137 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Investigating Language Learning Opportunities Provided by Out-of-school Online EFL Courses for Chinese K-12 Students written by Xueyan Sherry Duan and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To fully capitalize on the recent surge of out-of-school online English as a Foreign Language (EFL) courses for Chinese K-12 students, it is important to gain a better understanding of the innovative learning opportunities such courses can provide. Research suggests that EFL teaching in Chinese K-12 schools emphasizes students' English reading and listening, while offering students very few opportunities to speak and write in English - thus limiting their ability to use English to effectively communicate, as well as negatively affecting their writing and speaking scores in international English tests. Taking out-of-school online EFL courses may help off-set these limitations and will be especially valuable for students in under-resourced areas, as it will provide access to quality teachers and materials previously unavailable to them. To contribute to this goal, I explored what learning opportunities were provided to elementary Chinese students by the out-of-school online EFL courses offered by Superstar Academy (pseudonym) - a private non-profit educational institution in China that aims to enhance K-12 students' English proficiency outside of their traditional classrooms. These courses were selected because of their thoughtful design and implementation, as they employed an English immersion model and a content-based (literacy) language instruction, as well as a sophisticated online platform (LearningIn) allowing for multiple types of interactions. The study focused on multiple sections of Superstar's Grade 3 English course with an average of three to eight students in every class. I purposefully selected four most presentative teachers who were native English speakers from the U.S. or the U.K., and a total of 25 students in their classes. The study was informed by the following overarching research question: What kinds of language learning opportunities can out-of-school online EFL courses provide for Chinese K-12 students, when thoughtfully designed and implemented? More specifically, I investigated the following research questions in the context of the Superstar EFL courses: 1. What were the intended, implemented, and learned curriculum for the course studied? 2. What kinds of teacher-student, student-student, student-content, teacher-content, student-interface, and teacher-interface interactions could be observed in these classes, and how did they impact student learning? 3. What design elements and contextual factors were critical to the learning opportunities observed? I used a mixed-method case study research design to analyze the data collected, which included the publicly available information about the program, course artifacts, transcripts of selected online lessons, quantitative data automatically collected by LearningIn, interviews with two instructors, parent surveys, and researcher journals. This study is informed by the Interactionist Second Language Acquisition theory, Anderson's online learning model, as well as content-based language instruction. These three frameworks worked together to guide my study to explore the language learning opportunities these online courses provided from the lens of second-language acquisition, online teaching and learning, as well as instructional design and practice. Findings revealed that valuable language learning opportunities-including input, output, meaning-negotiation, and feedback opportunities-were created and taken advantage of in an online English immersion EFL teaching and learning environment, based on an English literacy-based language instruction. Findings from this study shed light on how to design and implement effective online EFL courses and programs that can eventually expand and improve the use of online EFL learning opportunities by Chinese K-12 students, and better support students' learning and development"--Pages xii-xiv.