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 🙂
Podcasting and Geography
kenneth@voyeurism recently presented a paper which explores how podcasting can be used in geography at the symposium of the commission on geographical education of the international geographic union and the international cartographic association (IGU-CGE) in brisbane. can check out the ideas even if you are not a geography teacher 🙂
URLs:
1. his blog post
2. his presentation’s slide
3. his paper
Sharing at AECT Research Symposia
juz completed my sharing at the aect research symposium, had a total of 8 pple in the room and we had some good discussions. just to re-capture some of the things discussed while memory’s still fresh. “control” was brought up by elizabeth, on the empowerment of students with control with the use of blogs, there may be teachers who arent comfortable with this way of working. she brought up an interesting metaphor stating that one day, teaching may just “hook on” to the tails of any form of technology and taps on the potentials/affordances. looking at blogging as a phenomenon as a whole, edublogging could be just that. given that students are already actively blogging, bringing blogging into the classroom is hooking on and riding on the tail; jim observed the possibilities of allowing soldiers in training to blog/podcast, and making it as a channel for soliders in different countries to exchange and learn abt the differences in their culture. susan shared abt marie clay’s book (an australian) on literacy and control of language which i shall hunt down to read. another though-provoking book which susan shared was vandijk’s “the deepening divide”.
my heartfelt gratitude goes to all who were in the room. as i mentioned at the beginning, ??????, thank you one and all for the ideas put forward. the slide that i have used goes here.
Internet Radio Gets Podcasts Without a Computer
Saw this post off Podcasting news, with the appearance of such an indepdendent device, podcasting/audioblogging is really going to be our next generation radio. Let’s see if/when the ‘official’ stations catch up with this trend :O
mp3, mp4, m4a, m4b, m4v – codec explained
This article gives an overview of the emergent codecs. People are now utilising the mp4 layer for their file encodings. Read this article to gain this know-how.
.m4a for podcast using the AAC format (may also contain either chapters or images or a mixture)
.m4b for podcasts with chapters and images (as in audiobooks; aka enhanced podcasts)
.m4v for vodcasts using the codec for movie files compatible with video iPods
.mp4 for vodcasts using this general video format
.mov for vodcasts using this traditional video format