LETEC Pedagogical Corpus: Reflective Teaching Journals

How to cite this pedagogical corpus

Wigham, C.R. & Chanier, T. (2013) Pedagogical corpus: Reflective Teaching Journals. Mulce.org : Clermont Université. [oai : mulce.org:mce-peda-rtjournals ; http://repository.mulce.org].

Target users

This pedagogical corpus, its resources and tasks have been designed for pre-service language teachers and teacher trainers. Whilst the activities are in English, in this version of the corpus (July 2013) the resources are in French. Target users must thus be proficient in the French language.

Objectives

  • identify language tutors' and students' differing views of successful collaboration
  • summarise the characteristics of successful collaboration and produce a list of implications for practice
  • appraise the advantages of keeping a teaching journal
  • compare and contrast reflections from a teaching journal with naturally occuring data (interaction tracks) and researcher-provoked data (student feedback) to analyse whether teachers should base reflections about teaching practice solely on journal entries and personal reactions

Learning outcomes

By the time you've worked through the reflective tasks of this corpus, as pre-service language teachers you should be able to:

Tutor's perceptions

  • use materials taken from in-world learning situations to compare and contrast students' impressions of the course with those of the language tutor
  • be aware that your take on a course, as a language teacher, may not be representative of the classroom action

Collaboration

  • you will have built your own list of implications for practice for successful collaboration
  • appreciate that the level of collaboration is judged not only through your teacher's perception of a course but by basing your judgement on students' perceptions and understandings

What are you going to do with this pedagogical corpus?

Using the tabs at the top of this page, you are going to work through the materials, resources and tasks in three stages.

Context of online language course from which this pedagogical corpus is built

The basis of this pedagogical corpus, is a teaching journal held by an EFL language tutor Tim Lewis during the Copéas course which he taught online in 2006. The tutor had no prior experience of online language teaching. The aim of the course was for students to develop skills for working with partners in the distance learning field. Students analysed educative websites and proposed a guide in their foreign language (English) for designing these. The students, who were studying a Master's programme in Open and Distance Education at the Université de Franche Comté, met online with their tutor eight times during the course. These sessions lasted for between 60 and 80 minutes and were held in the online environment Lyceum. The students were false beginners of English. Their previous study of English dated back to between five and 30 years prior to the course.

Technical requirements

In order to complete the reflective tasks proposed in this corpus, you will need to have the following software installed on your computer:

  • video player
  • zip-file utility
  • adobe reader
  • presentation creation software

It is recommended that you use this corpus with either the web browser Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. The browser needs to have the current version of Flash player enabled.

LETEC corpora references

The original LETEC corpora from which this pedagogical corpus has been created are the following:


Copyright Ciara R. Wigham, Thierry Chanier, 2013, Université Blaise Pascal