
I was born into a multi-cultural family and spent the first six years of my life in Borneo, Malaysia before moving to Canada. My family background, and the travelling I was exposed to as a child, inspired me to begin my own explorations at a fairly young age. When I was 15 years old, I went by myself to take part in a language exchange program for a year in the French-speaking province of Quebec, after which time I then moved to France to complete my final year of high school and my first year of university. Since then I have explored and lived in a wide variety of countries around the world, and have taught university students from diverse backgrounds in Taiwan, Canada, the United States and Hong Kong.
My objective as a teacher of language is to inspire my students to learn how to learn, both in terms of their language skills, but also to become life-long independent learners once they leave my classroom. I hope to inspire my students with the idea that teachers will not necessarily spoon-feed them with all the knowledge they need to ‘pass the course’. Learning to communicate successfully in another language is a challenging task. I aim to facilitate my students’ learning process, not give them the false sense that there are always ‘right ‘and ‘wrong’ ways to go about doing so. This is particularly the case in learning how to communicate effectively.
Professional Interests
My professional interests include educational technology, pedagogies that supplement blended learning, game based learning, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. I am so intrigued by the possibilities surrounding educational technology that I am currently completing another higher degree, this time a Masters In Educational Technology (MET) through the University of British Columbia (remote, online mode). Though working full-time as a lecturer for the CLE and completing a Masters degree at the same time is a challenge, I am inspired the fact that I can apply almost everything I learn to my teaching, while my teaching reflects back into what I am researching. There is always more to learn!
Scholarship
Evaluating the Use of Canvas' LMS New Analytics Tool in Language Course Engagement and Design: A Case Study from a Hong Kong University Language Center
Gaskell, Delian Dawn; Kushnazarov, Mansurbek
Independent learning in need or crisis? Independent learning under the new undergraduate curriculum in Hong Kong
Chan, Yin Ha Vivian; Gaskell, Delian Dawn; Tan, Mei Ah; Chao, Lip Yan Felix
Location: University of Brighton, London
Source: Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on E-Learning, v. 1 / Edited by Sue Greener and Asher Rospigliosi. Academic Publications, 2011, p. 117-123
Can learners use concordance feedback for writing errors?
Gaskell, Delian Dawn; Cobb, Thomas
DOI: 10.1016/j.system.2004.04.001
Sentence-level writing errors seem immune to many of the feedback forms devised over the years, apart from the slow accumulation of examples from the environment itself, which second language (L2) learners gradually notice and use to varying degrees. A computer corpus and concordance could provide these examples in less time and more noticeable form, but until now the use of this technology has assumed roughly the degree of language awareness most learners are aiming at. We report on attempts to make concordance information accessible to lower-intermediate L2 writers. These attempts capitalize on some newly available opportunities as concordancing goes online. Our report: (1) makes a case in principle for concordance information as feedback to sentence-level written errors, (2) describes a URL-link technology that allows teachers to create and embed concordances in learners' texts, (3) describes a trial of this approach with intermediate academic learners, and (4) presents preliminary results.