Bibliographic record
Abstract
Teaching Languages Online, 2nd Edition by Carla Meskill and Natasha Anthony Toronto, Ontario: Multilingual Matters, 2015, 237 pages ISBN: 978-1-78309-376-2 (paperback) As the digital world continues to transform at an overwhelming rate, affecting what resources are available and how we interact with one another, the need for an updated edition of such a volume is apparent. By adding new illustrations and contextual examples, as well as addressing learner attentiveness and the growth of 3D learning in language teaching, Meskill and Anthony continue to provide pedagogical support for language educators who teach all or part of their courses online. Meskill and Anthony acknowledge that multiple online environments or modes of interaction may often be used in concert within one teaching context; however, their intentional dissection here serves to underscore the affordances of each in promoting students' engagement and furthering their learning. Teaching Languages Online begins with an outline of the four environments--oral synchronous, oral asynchronous, written synchronous, and written asynchronous--and a discussion of the fundamentals of online language teaching, with specific attention to how it differs from instruction in traditional face-to-face language classrooms. Central to this discussion is an historical summary of the sociocultural view of learning, from which arises the notion of instructional conversations that provide the basis for the dialogic process of learning. Eight specific instructional conversation moves are identified--calling attention to forms, calling attention to lexis, corralling, saturating, using linguistic traps, modeling, providing explicit feedback, and providing implicit feedback--that later provide the sequential structure for each of the four primary chapters, which discuss their successful integration and realization in each unique environment. These chapters are grouped according to oral and written environments and are each followed by brief chapters offering suggestions for amplifying teaching and learning with complimentary modes of interaction. In the final chapter, Meskill and Anthony discuss how the development of students' skills are addressed in online environments, and provide examples of how curricula can be effectively designed to meet learning goals of diverse groups of students. Meskill and Anthony naturally emphasize the advantages of teaching languages online, many of which capitalize on the ways learners are already accustomed to interacting via the use of digital devices. On the other hand, potential complications and challenges that often accompany online teaching and learning of languages tend to be minimized. While the focus of this volume is admittedly not on the technical aspects of online teaching, this reader was anticipating greater emphasis on how to navigate the unique pedagogical demands and challenges in designing and executing instruction in an online environment. For example, Meskill and Anthony addressed the intensifying issue of learner attentiveness in the introduction but then did not consistently incorporate discussion of how to creatively engage learners in light of the distractions they face throughout the remaining chapters. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.146 | 0.107 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".