HIGH QUALITY TEACHING AT UNIVERSITY: SOME CONSIDERATIONS

 Dr. Oscar Manuel Narváez Trejo

Universidad Veracruzana 

 Dr. Oscar Narváez is professor at the Facultad de Idiomas, UV. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Kent, UK. His research interests are language learning beliefs and early leaving. He is interested in promoting teacher-based research in order to promote quality learning at University level in Mexico. 

The implementation of internal and external evaluation systems has motivated special attention to issues such as organizational models, academic production, and tutoring while neglecting matters directly related with pedagogical practices, an area in need of development and research. This paper develops the results of the research project “Teaching Practice from students’ perspectives” which sought to investigate students’ conceptions of quality pedagogical practices at the School of Languages, University of Veracruz. A survey was conducted through a questionnaire focusing on pedagogical factors whose presence or absence may affect the quality of practices. The questionnaire was developed out of an exploratory qualitative study on early leaving which voiced students’ critical insights on institutional practices. Although the study is essentially descriptive, its framework assumes that quality teaching practices should aim at fostering quality learning outcomes. Finding out whether students’ conceptions approximate to this view or deviate from it was one of the aims of the study since the link between low achievement and actual teaching has not been the focus of research in Mexican universities, let alone English BAs.

WHERE AND HOW DO EFL LEARNERS TEND TO REACH AND PASS INTERMEDIATE LEVEL?

 Mtro. Paul Davies

Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala

 Mtro. Paul Davies has worked in ELT since 1963, at the British Institute, Madrid, the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, the AngloMexican Foundation, the British Council Mexico, and, currently, the Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala. He has published EFL textbooks, methodology books and articles, and has given academic presentations all over Latin America.

Where do people learn EFL up to intermediate level – how much in programmed classroom courses, and how much outside classroom courses in the use and development of English they really need or choose? How do they learn – how much following the learning sequence and procedures proposed by their course syllabuses, materials and teachers, and how much following their own needs and inclinations? Intermediate level is focused on because it can be considered as a) the minimum worthwhile target for most EFL learning, and b) the take-off point for learners (after which many choose not to invest in more programmed courses). The answers (i.e. theories, hypotheses) offered in this talk are based on the literature and on personal observation. They include the widely accepted, but not so widely applied, theory that a high degree of learning autonomy is essential to become communicatively functional in a foreign language, and that successful learners tend to pursue their own agendas as well as (sometimes instead of) those of EFL courses they are taking. There are important implications for course design and teaching methodology.

CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK AND ITS VARIABLE EFFECTIVENESS IN SECOND LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS

Dr. Roy Lyster

McGill University 

 Dr. Roy Lyster is Professor of Second Language Education in the Department of Integrated Studies Education at McGill University in Canada. He has a PhD in Applied Linguistics as well as a B.Ed. and M.Ed. from the University of Toronto, and an MA from the Université de Paris VII. His research focuses primarily on immersion and content-based classrooms, including both observational and experimental studies of teacher-student interaction, form-focused instruction, and corrective feedback. He is past president of the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics and author of Learning and Teaching Languages Through Content: A Counterbalanced Approach, published by Benjamins in 2007.

 Since the 1970s, researchers have investigated the role of corrective feedback in second and foreign language classrooms, based on the premise that learners require feedback on error when they are not able to discover, through exposure to positive evidence alone, how their interlanguage differs from the target language. Classroom intervention studies have increasingly demonstrated that corrective feedback plays a significant role in improving classroom learners’ use of the target language. Whereas the provision of feedback has proven more effective than no feedback, there are still many variables that mediate feedback effectiveness. This talk will first identify a range of different types of oral feedback and then discuss their variable effectiveness in terms of empirical classroom research as well as theoretical perspectives. The debatable relevance of immediate learner repair will also addressed and then three main factors thought to affect feedback effectiveness will be presented: instructional setting (form-oriented versus meaning-oriented classrooms), learner age (children versus adults), and linguistic targets of feedback (grammatical, lexical, and phonological).