Articles Regarding Pedagogy to Bridge the Gap

¶ … articles regarding pedagogy to bridge the gap between practice and theory in education. We will see how new teachers can apply their freshly absorbed knowledge in order to benefit them in their fresh classroom environments in the area of ESOL teaching. Increasingly, immersion is seen to be effective in improving ESOL as well as it is in the teaching of foreign languages. What the study discovered is that interaction is the key in training children in ESOL

ESOL Effectiveness Online

Subjects/Participants

In an article in Journal of Research on Technology in Education analyzes the effectiveness ESOL students in communication using the agency of electronic discussion boards. The study focused on the use of electronic discussion boards equipped with ESOL students who were in grades K-12 in school. There has been a movement within ESL in recent years to concentrate on competency as opposed to grammar and form, hence the format seen in this study. 28 students participated. The students were drawn from seven different classes in six elementary schools. Eighteen of these were male while ten were female students. Seven of the students spoke Spanish and five students spoke Chinese. The other students spoke Russian, Samoan, Urdu, French, Pohnpeian, Korean, or in Arabic.

The study researchers assigned the students from the same schools into different discussion groups. This was so that the electronic chat room/discussion board was the only site for the students in the same discussion group to communicate with each other. In this way, each group, consisted of three to four students from different schools. Each had its own discussion area on the discussion board (Zha, Kelly, Park & Fitzgerald, 2006, 351).

Methodology

The purpose of the study was to investigate the students' communicative competence in a computer-mediated communication environment. Each activity lasted two weeks consecutively with the intervention including a one-week training period with three communication and writing activities in an electronic discussion board (ibid., 351-352).

Data Collection Procedures.

In order to study ESL in the computer-mediated environment, qualitative and quantitative methods were both used to analyze some 956 messages that were posted by the 28 ESL students to the electronic discussion board during a six-week period of time. After the coding, the children's chat room messages for Activities 1-3 were analyzed further by using both quantitative and quantitative analysis. The first-week introductory discussion board activity was not used in the analysis. This was because it was unlike the peer interactions in the follow-on activities. The children's self-introduction was done under the guidance of both the instructors and the researchers in this part of the training session. Quantitative analysis was performed to examine changes of children's communicative competence as measured by the ESOL Standards in the three activities. Variables in quantitative analysis were frequencies of the children's facility in the use of language as coded under the specific indicators in the ESOL Standards. Other qualitative usages were undertaken in order to examine the students' qualitative improvement in the use of their English through three consecutive activities.

Messages were then analyzed according to each of the three standards (ibid., 354-355).

Data Collection Instruments

The quantitative analysis was based upon the analysis of the coded messages in the study.

The students' communicative competence was analyzed for the following three standards titled Goal 1 Standard 1, Goal 1 Standard 2, and Goal 3 Standard 1. Goal 1 Standard 3 was not involved in the quantitative analysis because there were insufficient instances coded for the students' use of learning strategies. The coding practice and training facilitated and enhanced the researchers enhance consistent interpretation of their data and led to the reduction of individual interpretive biases. Before the researchers coded the discussion board messages, they chose messages from the students' discussions in order to practice coding independently. Also, they did this until there was a 90% or greater reliability of coding that was achieved. The differences in the coding system were constantly compared, resolved and discussed, and to meet the 90% level of consistency. Then, a coding book was developed for research use during the remaining data analysis. Also, more coding rules were defined by the researchers. This was in order to establish consistency in segmentation of the messages for coding. The researchers defined a coding unit was as a sentence. When the coding greetings and farewells were not complete sentences, then a farewell or greeting was defined as a coding unit (ibid., 343).

Significance of the Study

Changes were found in the children's use of language for social purposes as well as the appropriate language use in when they were in different social and cultural settings. The recommendations that were made included the redesign of the online discussion activities. In the study, the study students had a higher participatory rate in their collaborative activities and tasks than in their individual tasks and activities. The respondents' use of the medium of written language for personal expression increased significantly. Their style usage of the language increased with the increase in their online usage. While these qualitative observations appear encouraging, they were not necessarily quantitatively significant. While valid, they may take longer to manifest themselves. There remained but little evidence that the students used any other learning strategies to broaden their communicative competence, although a more structured approach may have improved the results more significantly (ibid., 363-364).

The results of the study offer researchers several guidelines to ESOL teachers for the effective use of electronic discussion boards in order to improve and facilitate K-12 ESOL students' written communication competence in the English target language. Firstly, online resources such as electronic chat rooms and discussion boards can be

utilized as effective learning environments to encourage ESOL students to observe their student peers' written English language. Such activities that involve peer review or peer observation can potentially help students to correct their use of the English language. Secondly, it is evident that online group activities can be further used to promote students' use of the English language

(ibid., 363).

It is the opinion of the author that the above approach is correct given the demonstrated effectiveness of immersion as a learning technique. Facility comes before grammar, even in ESOL. However, as indicated and is normal in any study, the study population could have been larger and the procedures and methodology could be tightened to better structure such studies in the future. The results do seem promising enough to warrant this. In this author's field of ESOL, there are broad implications auguring for immersion study to speed and improve the quality of learning in a hands on classroom environment.