Overview and Syllabus

The first CLERAC class in the spring semester was conducted on 16/04/2014 (09.15–10.45), and the last (28th) on 18/07/2014. The total amount of teaching time was 42 hours (28x90 mins). The number of students was 25, all the students passed the semester and continued to study with me in autumn.

The focus of this semester is to prepare the students for the more content-focused classes which start in autumn. In order to do this, the spring semester has a language-based focus and aims to teach academic skills (writing a short research paper with citations, listening to lectures and note-taking), but also with a strong communicative element.

Teachers are required to design their own syllabus around the clear guidelines set by CLER. I opted to structure my classes around inter-related content-topic areas, which would change roughly every two weeks and involve students doing their own research which could then be used as a focus for final projects. CLER stipulates that students must write a 400-word report and give a five-minute presentation, but because my class would spend half the semester (every Friday) in a CALL room, I decided to make more use of the computers by replacing the presentation with a group video project. This had a lot in common with the DCT course mentioned in the introduction as the initial impetus for my inquiry. Since that class, I have done many video projects with students, so I felt confident that, with the time in the CALL room and my experience, I could encourage the students to produce a high-quality video project. As outlined in the participants section (3.4.2), all but two of the students in my CLERAC class were from the faculty of Science and Technology, thus I felt that, like English, using computers would be a particularly important life skill for them.

The syllabus was constructed around the following topics:

1. World English: Explanation of English as an international language, introduction to the World Englishes debate, discussion of English as a Lingua Franca.

2. Online Security: Examination of online security issues and identity, especially focusing on Digital Shadow and communication change through technology exposure.

3. Real or Fake?: Students try to determine the difference between real and fake photographs, then create their own real or fake stories.

4. Fallacies in a logical argument: discussion of critical thinking skills, debating skills. 5. Final Video Projects: Students choose their own topics and create a video around

the theme in groups. This is assessed as a final project. The 400-word research essay is also based on the same topic.

The original syllabus (see appendix 10.1) contained several additional topics not covered in the final course, and not all of them had an equal amount of class-time. This was because of the flexible, student-centred and emergent nature of the course as I began to focus on personalising the content in order to highlight authenticity and develop mutually motivating content. Topics for the Final Video Project became very diverse. Most students worked in groups, although there were three students who chose to work on their own (lone). Towards the end of semester, assessments inevitably became foregrounded, and there were many different types of assessment, requiring careful record keeping and grading to ensure each student met requirements. Assessments were somewhat further complicated by my choice to include a number of alternative assessment approaches, one of which was the Self- Assessments used to calculate Class Participation which was generally complimented by reaction papers which the students composed on the class Moodle. One important

justification for these assessments, which came to my attention later, is Ushioda’s call for

classwork that highlights metacognition (in terms of thinking about the aims of class) in order to help learners sustain higher levels of motivation (2014). Self-assessment is also advocated as part of an Exploratory Practice framework (Allwright & Hanks, 2009). Another form of alternative assessments were the diagnostic exams, required for the students to gain 10% of

their grade, but only awarded for taking the test independent of students’ actual score.

These types of assessment were consciously developed in order to foster the students’

autonomy as language learners; another aspect of how I tried to maintain motivation and create an environment of authenticity was based around the concept of the Language

Impetus Triad detailed in Chapter Two. These assessment types will be covered in more detail later in this section as they both form the nucleus of important critical incidents and serve as indicators to motivational synergy, especially as a form of feedback between teacher and student.

What follows is the chronological narrative of the spring semester, with certain critical incidents and snapshots given a more detailed focus so as to highlight the most salient parts of the inquiry as they relate to authenticity and teacher-student motivational synergy. In this

way, the narrative is presented from the perspective of an ‘analytical lens’ (Ushioda, 2015, p. 51) which moves in and out of focus, closing in and on the events that would seem most to indicate the synergistic relationship between teacher and student motivation at the heart of this study.