Reflections
Visionary merry-go-round of distance teaching
Click on the arrow on
the right to start the tour.
Slide 0 / 11
The Miriadi sessions: distance collaborative scenario in intercomprehension.
Assignment of the Master 2 in Language Teachint and ICT, January 2023
Course Approaches to different teaching contexts
In this text I analyze the advantages and disadvantages of a telecollaborative scenario in intercomprehension on the Miriadi site, and the relational and time dynamics.
This 5-page text may be useful to you as a presentation of a scenario on Miriadi, or as for its considerations about technology-mediated language teaching. But what is more interesting are the characteristics of face-to-face classroom teaching which become visible by contrast. This is the point of arrival of a reflection on teaching environments, digital or physical, which I have been carrying out for a while.
The text also includes a small part where I reflect on some aspects of the professional contexts in which I have worked over time.
Miriadi is a website specifically designed and created for international work sessions in intercomprehension. In an intercomprehension course several languages, similar to those of the learners, are jointly approached; all participants express themselves in their own language, each one makes efforts and so develop linguistic-communicative strategies and discovers many cultural issues.
Article Professional training and metaphors (La formazione e le metafore)
Additional Article , 27th congress of AIF- Italian Association of Professional Trainers, december 2015
During AIF congress in 2015 I collected the metaphors I heard uttered. From this collection, certainly without scientific pretension, the work of collective thought emerges. It conceptualizes the notions of training, trainer, learner, learning context.
In personally synthesize this panorama with two overall ideas. Addition metaphors - where learning is, roughly, to increase knowledge. And metaphors of elaboration – where learning is reshaping what already exists. Among the former, spatial metaphors and particularly exploration metaphors are dominant; among the latter we find Neoplatonic formative metaphors and medical metaphors of care. An intermediate zone is represented by seed metaphors, where something existing develops into a new form, although foreseen.
Is immersion enough for learning a language?
Assignment of the Master 2 in Language Didactics and ICT, January 2023
Course Theories of language learning
The metaphor of language learning as immersion is so usual that it passes unnoticed. The risk for some is to only think of language learning through this metaphor. The possible reasons for retaining it - which undoubtedly allow us to understand some aspects of what it is to learn a language - are just as much part of the trap. Immersion is not sufficient, as evidenced by the failure encountered by a significant portion of immigrants from any industrialized country, frozen around the A2 level. In the text the reasons for this failure are explained, as well as the causes of the success of all the other immigrants who achieve better levels of language proficiency.
The text is an assignment from the Language Learning Theories course. It might not be always clear since it implicitely relies onto background knowledge mentioned in the course (this can be found in H. Hilton Cognitive science and language learning. Paris: Cnesco, 2019 - online).
Subjectivity and feasibility in the CEFR guidelines on evaluation
Assignment of the Master 2 in Language Didactics and ICT, January 2023
Course Evaluation and assessment
In the society of the "égalité des chances" (equal opportunities) it is very important to evaluate two people the same way, and on exactly what they are supposed to be evaluated on. Establishing criteria for language skills evaluation and subsequently operationalize them in descriptors are therefore major challenges for any assessment test. However, examiners do not have infinite mental capabilities: this necessarily implies a degree of subjective holistic impression in the implementation of the tests. Anticipating and managing this subjectivity upstream when designing a test architecture is therefore fundamental to guarantee its feasibility and, consequently, its reliability and validity.