nearly 1 month ago, 20th june marks the day that i’m officially graduated from my (1st) MA course and this is the envelope that flew all the way from singapore:
besides sharing the joy, here’s my research for sharing:
Title:
An Exploratory Study on a Metacognitive Approach to Teaching and Learning of Spontaneous Speaking in Chinese Language with Audioblogs
Keywords:
chinese language, speaking, audioblogs, metacognition, language learning, language teaching, educational technology, weblog, edublog, 华文, 口语教学,元认知,博客,信息科技,有声博客
Summary:
Language learning involves four areas, namely listening, speaking, reading
and writing. This study focuses on speaking, an area that is often neglected by
teachers for various reasons. In many Chinese Language classrooms, which are
teacher-centered by tradition, students have minimal opportunities to actively
participate in the negotiation of meaning during lesson. To develop students to
become independent learners of speaking in Chinese Language, a metacognitive
framework developed by Goh and Zhang (2002) was adopted in this study. Twenty-five
Secondary Two Express stream Chinese Language students, aged 13 to 14,
participated in this eight weeks study. Audioblogs was used as the mediating
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool through which the students
interacted as they developed their metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive
awareness. Through the use of scaffolding questions, the students carried out self-appraisals to evaluate and monitor their oral performances and planned for their
future speaking tasks. The students were also tasked to provide comments for peers’ oral performances. Seven usable sets of data were analysed and based on inferential
statistics, the treatment may have led the students to improve significantly in their
pretest-posttest oral performance scores. Through peer commenting and self-appraisal
activities in the audioblogs, the students developed greater metacognitive
knowledge and metacognitive awareness.
and here’s the thesis in PDF format. you may need to grab acrobat reader 8 or above to read the content.
and last but not least, i would like to thank the following friends once again, as without their help and encouragement, this research would not have been possible:
Dr Tan Seng Chee (my sup), Dr Christine Goh C.M., Mr. Lim Sing Gee, Mdm. Tan Hiok Keng, Mdm. Ho Fui Ling, Ms. Hoe Joe Hwee and Mr. Amos Goh Yoong Shin, Mr. Darren Anthonio Marino Nonis, Mr. John Ow Eu Gene, Ms. Jeanne Marie Ho Pau Yuen and Dr. Chua Guat Kheng. and last but not least yh2, yh3 and yh4 🙂
a research paper on students’ perspective of edublogs
chanced upon this MA research paper “Learning through Weblogs” in my google alert today, this research paper examined edublogs from a higher ed. students’ perspective. the abstract reads:
The study reported in this paper examines students’ perception of the use of weblogs as learning tools; it also explores evidence of learning within blog postings. Two Ryerson University courses in Information Technology Management that require students to use weblogs are taken as examples. Twenty-two students from these two courses participated in an online survey concerning their blogging experience. The participants had very good computer knowledge—most of them had previous experience using blogs. Most of them thought that building and maintaining a blog was an easy task. However, the research shows that students’ perception concerning the use of blogs as educational tools was neutral—students also perceived the impact of using blogs on their ability to learn the course material as neutral. The study shows a lack of clear communication between instructors and students, which could have had a negative impact on students’ learning experience. Furthermore, the study indicates that most students perceived the content they posted in a somewhat negative way. A content analysis performed on 22 blogs demonstrates that that the objectives of each course played a significant impact on the evidences of learning apparent in students’ blogs. Students in group B demonstrated more evidences of learning then students in group A. Overall, the study shows that the use of blogs as learning tool in university classrooms is promising. Providing students with clear goals, objectives and expectations could help them to build and maintain their blogs in a way that could be more beneficial to their learning experience.
the full paper in doc format can be downloaded here.
APA reference:
Gagné, C. & Fels, D. (2007). Learning through Weblogs. In G. Richards (Ed.), Proceedings of World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2007 (pp. 2518-2526). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
BlogTalk 2008 archives
shows how long i have neglected to check my feeds on bloglines, blogtalk 2008’s held on mar 2-4 in ireland, more than 2 weeks now. it was just like yesterday that we attended blogtalk downunder at sydney in 2005 😮
anyway, here’s the conference site/blog and some slides shared during the conference. will look at some of them to find some inspirations 🙂
2 EDUCAUSE CONNECT articles
for record and (future) reading pleasure:
1. Using Blogs for Formative Assessment and Interactive Teaching [article]
2. Using technology in teaching and learning: Resources to help you navigate a digital world [article]
Rationale for educational blogging
it’s been a while since posting about edublogging has appeared in this page. went into digging my bloglines feeds pile and found this piece of reflection by Anne Davis.
read this article if you want to know why you should introduce blogging to your students (if you have not already done so that is) 🙂