Creating a meaningful, inclusive, experimental university EFL course - A case study from Finland

Beskrivning

Creating a meaningful, inclusive, experimental university EFL course - A case study from Finland

In Finland, all teacher education programmes are taught at the university level and include an obligatory 5 ECTS credit course in English as a Foreign Language provided by the Language Centre. In Finland, English is taught as a subject at all levels of education from grade 3, and Finland ranks as the sixth country most fluent in English as a whole. However, language teaching is quite traditional and needs to be more inclusive. The following case displays participatory action research on course design, involving three iterations with increasing levels of inclusive elements incorporated in the course design. The course elements tested were oral assignments, differentiation in course input and output, guided listening comprehensions, practical exercises, working with only one academic article throughout the course, working with academic reporting and vocabulary lists, and embodied learning. Additionally, the course comprised minimal grammar instruction, a lecture on how to work pedagogically with teacher Barriers to Learning and Social Participation (BAPs), providing technological and practical accommodations to all participants, planning and preparing all study material, homework and examination before the course started, diagnostic testing, pre-survey on BAPs, voiding the need for BAP certificate, a broader definition on what BAPs may include, formative assessment, constructive alignment, progress pedagogy, fair assessment, relational pedagogy, sticker pedagogy, equity and equality, and transparency at all levels. Students brought their learning material, worked on concurrent course work in other courses, searched, created the documentation and mock interviewed for a currently open position they would want. The results included a proportional increase in participants with BAPs, higher average grades than the corresponding course by 1.2 (scale 1-5), increased student well-being and, most importantly, a flower at the author's desk with a note saying "thank you so much for taking us into consideration in your courses. Signed: Academic Dyslectics Anonymous". The experiment showed that as a teacher, traditional language learning needs to create more affordances to meet the needs of the BAP students, teacher students similarly have BAPs, and everyone benefits from differentiation and creating affordances for all. There is no upper limit to how pedagogically, and didactically creative a language teacher can become and no upper limit to how much a teacher can improve student well-being and output quality with reasonably low-level interventions.

Period	26 apr. 2023
Evenemangstitel	CIIDLEM 2023 - Congreso Internacional en Investigación y Docencia en Lenguas Modernas - International Congress on Research and Teaching of Modern Languages
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Plats	Tuxtla Gutierres, MexikoVisa på karta