Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

To investigate the value of electronic conferences for English learners, I will first review some major studies related to the use of computers in language classrooms, then present a qualitative analysis of an e-mail corpus collected from a large-scale international writing project that involved 20 ESL discussion groups at the college level. The study attempts to investigate the democratic influence of computer-mediated communication (CMC), and examine the subsequent benefits for language learners. It was found that electronic conferencing encourages a movement from teacher-centred to learner-centred pedagogy, resulting in students constructing their knowledge together, heightening their language awareness, developing spontaneity in communicating in English and sharpening the precision of their word choice.

In 1991, Wendy Assinder described a classroom experiment she had carried out in which her students prepared their own classroom materials and then taught them to each other. She subsequently reported on the positive effects of this approach on their language learning, and on their attitudes towards learning. Inspired by her findings, and those of others, two university language teachers conducted a similar classroom experiment, in which students actively participated in developing and delivering learning materials for an ESP course in legal English. This article describes how the course was conducted, and the results of the course evaluation, to which the students and teachers both contributed. It then discusses the results, which were much less positive than Assinder's, Attempting to see why this might have been the case, and making recommendations for future uses of the approach.