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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Anne Preston
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Debates over the role of technology in language education are of more and more importance as educational technologies offer increasingly ubiquitous opportunities. However, whilst educational technologies are increasingly prevalent, there is frequently a disconnect between the developers who build technology and the teachers for whom the technology is built. As cutting-edge educational technologies are so radically different, teachers can be sceptical about their pedagogical grounding, and struggle to harness the technologies in a pedagogically informed manner. This paper offers an applied linguistic perspective to examine the new lines of communication in this area based on data from pair-work sessions made up of one language teacher and one computing programmer. The sessions were designed to support a group of teachers’ and programmers’’ co-construction of a common knowledge concerning a specific computing programme developed to promote language learning. Episodes of talk are presented which highlight how the teachers and programmers developed a shared understanding of both pedagogical and technical features of the programme. Using sociocultural discourse analysis, the paper demonstrates how the pairs worked in very different ways. In particularly, the moment to moment analysis of these interactions suggests that different approaches were more successful than others. This is seen most clearly in the relation to the development of the teachers’ understanding of the role played by the technology in the materials development offered by the programme, and importantly, of linking this role with the teacher’s pedagogical understanding. Overall, this paper shows how the use of applied linguistic-oriented research methodologies can hold much potential for exploring the development of educational technology, including the development of specific guidelines for teacher-specific development.
Author(s): Preston A
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: British Association of Applied Linguistics 2013: Opening New Lines of Communication in Applied Linguistics
Year of Conference: 2013
URL: http://www.baal.org.uk/baal_conf.html
