Reflection on how educational technologies foster communication between teachers and learners of languages and cultures. Describes a project aimed at promoting mobility 'between China and Italy of Chinese students and researchers, reflecting on its possible uses of technology to facilitate communication between teacher and student belonging to language groups and cultures.
The Net, Web 2.0 and the new technologies and tools allow us to be constantly online, suggesting new paradigms that involve aspect of sociology and communication; in fact, learning methodology, as well, is affected by this wind of change. Flipped classroom methodology (Bergmann, Sams, 2012) is currently riding the wave of success in Higher Education and Distance Learning: it consists in a sort of an “upside down” way of teaching, comparing to the “traditional” one, where the student is personally involved into the learning process by giving him/her the responsibility of researching, comparing, contrasting concepts and ideas. The student takes an active role during the lesson in class and at home, when s/he prepares some material that can be useful for the lesson time (Maglioni, Biscaro, 2012). Moreover, the method promotes an extreme individualization of the learning process since the student is able to choose his/her personal rhythm of learning and his/her style of knowledge acquisition, pointing the accent on the well-known (and sometimes abused) Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory (Gardner, 1983). In this contribution, an experimental session of language lessons will be presented. Since the “flipped classroom” method seems to fit the way of teaching and learning a second language, we will present the structure, methodology, technical tools and initial results of two different educational contexts: a university, online context of Italian for foreigner courses at beginner and false beginner levels, and a K12, absolute beginner, Italian for foreigner course. Such results will endorse a deeper reflection on how the method can be applied in K12 and Higher Education and will suggest some future developments.
Il volume raccoglie contributi di esperti nel campo della didattica della lingua e della cultura italiana, in particolare mediante l’uso delle tecnologie digitali. I contributi della sezione Coordinate inquadrano dal punto di vista teorico le questioni, tra loro interrelate, su cui si focalizza il volume: didattica della lingua; formazione dei docenti; uso delle tecnologie digitali nella didattica; intercultura. I contributi della sezione Esperienze sono invece maggiormente legati ad esperienze realizzate “sul campo” in ambienti virtuali di apprendimento, con approcci e metodologie diversi e con differenti profili di apprendenti. Gli autori trattano i vari temi mettendo in luce le potenzialità nell’uso delle tecnologie digitali e al contempo evidenziando come il loro efficace utilizzo richieda adattamenti metodologici, anche rilevanti, da parte dei docenti. Il volume si rivolge principalmente a un pubblico di utenti che possiede già una formazione glottodidattica di base (studenti di Master; Scuole di Specializzazione; Corsi professionalizzanti; Lauree Magistrali) e a quanti, più in generale, sono interessati alle questioni relative alla didattica della lingua e della cultura non materne, soprattutto con l’uso delle tecnologie digitali.
This volume brings together contributions from academics, language teachers and practitioners from across Europe and beyond to discuss questions of autonomy and technology in the area of language learning and translation. The book focuses on English, French, Italian, Irish and Spanish language acquisition, but many of the essays also develop an interlinguistic perspective from a plurilingual point of view. The book opens with key contributions from a number of leading scholars: Dr Daniel Cassany on critical literacies, Professor Henrik Gottlieb on translation into ‘minor’ languages, and Professor David Little on autonomy in language learning. These are followed by explorations of translation, technology, intercultural issues, autonomous learning and the European Language Portfolio. The volume represents an important contribution to the development of new plurilingual approaches to language teaching and learning.
Self-regulated learning (SRL) takes place when individuals plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning experiences. Learning assessment plays a crucial role in this process because it provides an excellent basis for the above three phases of SRL; however, the identification, design and implementation of meaningful assessment activities is not easy and some technological affordances for an SRL-sensitive assessment design still need to be explored. Although Digital Badges are already considered an instrument that could provide good answers to the complex problem of assessment for learning, their potential for SRL support is rather under-explored. This paper puts forward a proposal on the role that Digital Badges can play in supporting SRL. The proposal consists in a “badge ecosystem”, developed for a course on “Scientific Information for Biomedical Research”, aimed at differentiating among different levels of competence to facilitate learners in making better informed decisions on how to go about in their learning process. The conclusions discuss the expected advantages and shortcomings of the proposed ecosystem.