Idioma: Español
Fecha: Subida: 2021-04-12T00:00:00+02:00
Duración: 19m 16s
Lugar: Conferencia
Visitas: 1.036 visitas

Virtual exchange in primary education: a case study focusing on synchronous communication

Begoña Clavel Arroitia and Barry Pennock Speck (Universitat de Valencia)

Descripción

In the field of language learning, Telecollaboration or, as it is more widely known today, Virtual Exchange (VE) (O’Dowd 2018), normally takes the form of chats, blogs, video-conferences or meetings and activities in virtual worlds. Although the number of publications into VE has increased greatly in the last ten years, very few studies make use of corpus linguistics (Orsini-Jones, et al., 2016), even fewer use corpus linguistics to analyse synchronous communication (Author1, 2019; Author2 and Author1, 2019; Rampazzo and Aranha, 2019) and, as far as we know, ours is the only study to employ corpus linguistics to study synchronous communication among primary school pupils. Our objective, therefore, is, to fill this gap to get a preliminary picture of the differences between VE at the primary, secondary and tertiary level.

In this study, a corpus of pupil interactions from a classroom discourse analysis perspective was analysed using AntConc. The corpus was made up of five video interactions in English between a Spanish state primary CLIL school in the Valencian region and a French state primary school in the Bordeaux region. The videos involved twenty-three pairs of Spanish and French pupils (16 French boys, 7 French girls, 14 Spanish boys, 9 Spanish girls). As we focus on the language learning interactions, the conversations that took place between the French and Spanish teachers and the coaches were eliminated manually. The corpus, of 9,969 word tokens, is trilingual since the interventions in French and Spanish form an integral part of the interaction among the pupils and among the pupils and the teachers.

All the participants were tagged in the transcription and it was found that the French teacher intervened on 553 occasions while the Spanish teacher did so 182 times. The phrase “And you”, for example, was elicited by the French teacher 82 times while the Spanish students used this gambit without the need for any elicitation from their teacher. The basic nature of the communication as a whole was also in evidence through the preponderance of the N-grams “What is (what’s) your favourite” (175 occurrences); “I don’t know” (37 occurrences); “can you repeat, please” (37 occurrences), and “how old are you” (30 occurrences).

The quantitative results show that the French and Spanish peers were able to ask and answer simple questions but that the former needed much more coaching. The Spanish students were much more autonomous due to their higher level of proficiency. Another conclusion is that, in spite of the rudimentary language used, both the French and Spanish students enjoyed the experience and were highly motivated –according to the information obtained in an analysis of the Whatsapp interactions between the teachers and their coaches. These results show that VE among primary school pupils is a viable and motivationally useful activity but must take into account the constraints caused mainly by the lower level of linguistic proficiency found in this age group as compared to secondary and tertiary education.

Propietarios

Congreso Cilc 2021

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Serie: CILC2021: Los corpus y la adquisición y enseñanza del lenguaje / Corpora, LA and teaching (+información)