Academic Writing and Information Literacy Instruction in Digital Environments: A Complementary Approach

This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to the teaching of academic writing and information literacy in a new digital dimension, drawing on recent trends towards project-based writing, digital writing and multimodal writing in Education, and synthesising theory with practice to provide a handy toolkit for teachers and researchers. The author combines a practical orientation to teaching academic writing and information literacy with a grounding in current theories of writing instruction in the digitalized era, and argue that as digital environments become more universal in modern society - particularly in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic - the lines between traditional academic writing and multi-modal digital writing must necessary become blurred. This book will be of use to teachers and instructors of academic writing and information literacy, particularly within the context of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), as well as students and researchers in Applied Linguistics, Pedagogy and Digital Writing. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

STORM-GAN: Spatio-Temporal Meta-GAN for Cross-City Estimation of Human Mobility Responses to COVID-19

Human mobility estimation is crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic due to its significant guidance for policymakers to make non-pharmaceutical interventions. While deep learning approaches outperform conventional estimation techniques on tasks with abundant training data, the continuously evolving pandemic poses a significant challenge to solving this problem due to data non-stationarity, limited observations, and complex social contexts. Prior works on mobility estimation either focus on a single city or lack the ability to model the spatio-temporal dependencies across cities and time periods. To address these issues, we make the first attempt to tackle the cross-city human mobility estimation problem through a deep meta-generative framework. We propose a Spatio-Temporal Meta-Generative Adversarial Network (STORM-GAN) model that estimates dynamic human mobility responses under a set of social and policy conditions related to COVID-19. Facilitated by a novel spatio-temporal task-based graph (STTG) embedding, STORM-GAN is capable of learning shared knowledge from a spatio-temporal distribution of estimation tasks and quickly adapting to new cities and time periods with limited training samples. The STTG embedding component is designed to capture the similarities among cities to mitigate cross-task heterogeneity. Experimental results on real-world data show that the proposed approach can greatly improve estimation performance and outperform baselines. © 2022 IEEE.

Developing Academic Writing Skills through a Task-Based Approach: A Case Study of Students' Collaborative Writing

This mixed-methods study explored the students' learning from the task-based collaborative writing process (Ellis, 2003;Willis, 1996) and the effects of its process on their writing improvement in a compulsory academic writing course. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this course was conducted completely online. This 15-week course followed the parallel sessions of 1) the instructor lectures for the writing practices and student practices of collaborative writing in class, 2) students collaboratively write their first draft outside classroom, 3) the instructor's oral and written feedback for the first draft of students' work, 4) online group conference among group members to collaboratively reflect their own learning from instructor feedback, and 5) collaborative revision of the first draft before submitting a final draft. These sessions recurred four times during the course when the students worked on each assigned task that made up a group project. These four writing tasks included a research proposal, a literature review, a report of interviews or surveys, and discussion of the findings. At the end of the semester, all groups orally presented their projects. Data were collected from two drafts of all four essays, group conferences with the instructor, and dialogues during group reflection conferences. Overall, the participating students were found to have positive perception of the task-based collaborative writing because it allowed them to have a deeper understanding of the research process and improve the content and organization of their writing. Implications suggest aspects of the process that contribute to the students' positive perceptions and writing improvements. © 2022, School of Liberal Arts, King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi. All rights reserved.

Integrating Task-Based Learning and Pragmatics: Some practical ideas

Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT), or Ensino de Línguas Baseado em Tarefas, in Portuguese, requires pragmatic skills from its students because it privileges authentic communicative interactions. However, very little has been written about how to combine TBLT with pragmatics in teaching contexts. This article offers two lesson plans that consider both TBLT and a specific pragmatic aspect, speech acts, with the purpose of providing ideas to be adapted to different contexts. The target audience contemplated in the article was native Portuguese speaking first graders, from a bilingual public school, that adopts Context and Integrated Language Learning (CLIL). The subject is Science, and the class is taught in English. Both lessons are an adapted version of an asynchronous online lesson planned and taught by me in September 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. © 2022 The authors.

Practice and Exploration of a Task-Based Method for the Online Teaching of Undergraduate Geophysics Courses

In 2020, the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) became a catalyst for the development of online teaching. However, online teaching has faced the problems of insufficient teaching flexibility and weakened teacher management, which has greatly affected teaching effectiveness in science and engineering. A task-based method has universality and applicability in teaching activities. This method, combined with the diversified auxiliary tools in online teaching of the task-based method, in undergraduate geophysical courses was adopted. Following online teaching in spring 2020, students have made great progress in terms of geophysics competition. In addition, the statistical results of the questionnaire showed that more than half of undergraduates endorsed task-based teaching. This study indicates that online task-based teaching in geophysical courses has already made initial progress in increasing the flexibility of teaching, improving students' self-learning awareness, and developing their exploration and design skills. Task-based online teaching can be widely promoted for earth science and other science and engineering majors.

Interval assessment using task- and procedure-based simulations: an attempt to supplement neurosurgical residency curriculum.

OBJECTIVE: The longer learning curve and smaller margin of error make nontraditional, or "out of operating room" simulation training, essential in neurosurgery. In this study, the authors propose an evaluation system for residents combining both task-based and procedure-based exercises and also present the perception of residents regarding its utility. METHODS: Residents were evaluated using a combination of task-based and virtual reality (VR)-based exercises. The results were analyzed in terms of the seniority of the residents as well as their laboratory credits. Questionnaire-based feedback was sought from the residents regarding the utility of this evaluation system incorporating the VR-based exercises. RESULTS: A total of 35 residents were included in this study and were divided into 3 groups according to seniority. There were 11 residents in groups 1 and 3 and 13 residents in group 2. On the overall assessment of microsuturing skills including both 4-0 and 10-0 microsuturing, the suturing skills of groups 2 and 3 were observed to be better than those of group 1 (p = 0.0014). Additionally, it was found that microsuturing scores improved significantly with the increasing laboratory credits (R2 = 0.72, p < 0.001), and this was found to be the most significant for group 1 residents (R2 = 0.85, p < 0.001). Group 3 residents performed significantly better than the other two groups in both straight (p = 0.02) and diagonal (p = 0.042) ring transfer tasks, but there was no significant difference between group 1 and group 2 residents (p = 0.35). Endoscopic evaluation points were also found to be positively correlated with previous laboratory training (p = 0.002); however, for the individual seniority groups, the correlation failed to reach statistical significance. The 3 seniority groups performed similarly in the cranial and spinal VR modules. Group 3 residents showed significant disagreement with the utility of the VR platform for improving surgical dexterity (p = 0.027) and improving the understanding of surgical procedures (p = 0.034). Similarly, there was greater disagreement for VR-based evaluation to identify target areas of improvement among the senior residents (groups 2 and 3), but it did not reach statistical significance (p = 0.194). CONCLUSIONS: The combination of task- and procedure-based assessment of trainees using physical and VR simulation models can supplement the existing neurosurgery curriculum. The currently available VR-based simulations are useful in the early years of training, but they need significant improvement to offer beneficial learning opportunities to senior trainees.

Online simulated workplace tasks to enhance business English learning

Purpose: This paper aims to provide evidence that online well-designed educational tasks can provide more relevant and richer active learning environment for business English learners. The benefits of online tasks, as an education tool, became more apparent and gained more importance during the events related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The task design is based on task-based interactions and in a sequence of tasks with the support of an online learning management system (LMS). The findings suggest that online task-based learning (and would-be blended learning in the future) enables meaningful and authentic activities promoting interactions and communicative competences to prepare for learners of business English to enter the workplace. Design/methodology/approach: The overarching aim of the study is to explore how task-design-utilizing online LMS could contribute to enhancing the learning process and to the development of the learner's communicative competences. The study included two aspects, namely: (1) the design of online tasks and (2) pilot evaluation. The task design involved tasks that required interactions between the learners. The pilot evaluation relied on data collection via questionnaires. Findings: Two aspects relating to the findings: (1) a description of the teaching initiatives which was designed to see how blended learning and online tasks can enhance learning and develop the skills of the learners: with questioning techniques targeting communication skills, simulated workplace situations and timely feedback and peer influence;(2) the findings of the pilot study evaluation to see the actual implementation of online tasks. The students' responses corroborate the teachers' comments. The findings of this research showed that LMS tasks, which were designed for this study, helped the learners to enhance their competence in business English. Such competences included communicative skills needed for learners to enter the workplace such as interpersonal skills, presentation skills and negotiation skills in contexts. These findings lead to significant recommendations regarding the way forward for developing active blended learning. Research limitations/implications: Firstly, teachers need to be trained and involved in designing such online tasks and materials to be used in active blended learning. More training in language teaching methodologies should be investigated to adapt the transition from a traditional to a computer-assisted language learning teacher. This helps teachers to design and implement online simulated workplace tasks. Secondly, time for the use of online tasks should be allocated satisfactorily. This can be achieved by building online learning sessions into class schedule or developing active blended courses. The time for the use of online simulated tasks should be allocated satisfactorily with lab or simulation room, in which students would be shown how to access the online tasks designed on the university LMS and the way to practice with different kinds of tasks. Originality/value: In this study context, the online tasks design can initiate at activity-level blending to support face-to-face (F2F) activities, for example, online activities to support tasks for the topic Make a request or Offer for help. This can be extended to course-level blending when more online activities are designed to use with F2F activities such as online comparing and contrasting tasks to develop skills in connections with the awareness of cultures. The findings of the research suggest to develop and to implement online tasks alongside with classroom learning and teaching to enable the objectives of business English programme at university for preparing learners to enter the workplace. The recent pandemic highlighted the need for effective methodologies for active blended learning. It is now required that professionals in higher education to collect evidence base to inform future practice of such methodologies. Further significant research efforts should be directed towards collecting such evidence of the effectiv ness and improvements of such methods. The support of higher education management professionals in securing funding for such research will be essential. © 2021, Thi Hong Le Vo.

Integrating Task and Game-Based Learning into an Online Toefl Preparatory Course during the Covid-19 Outbreak at Two Indonesian Higher Education Institutions

Purpose - This study examined the integration of task and game-based learning into an online Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) preparatory course taught at two Indonesian higher education institutions (HEI) over a period of 20 online class meetings totaling 40 class hours. Methodology - Using a single-case experimental design, it engaged undergraduate students enrolled in a TOEFL preparatory course in March 2021 at Politcknik Perkerctaapian Indonesia Madiun (N = 48) and Universitas Muhadi Setiabudi, Indonesia (N = 48). The study used multiple t-tests and one-way ANOVA with Cohen d to determine the degree of impact on students' total outcome on pretest and post-test, as well as their scores on particular skills. Findings - Multiple paired-sample t-tests revealed significant improvement in students' overall scores (t (95) = 15.35, p < 001) and in specific-skills scores for Listening Comprehension (t (95) = 10.32, p < 001), Structure and Written Expression (t (95) = 5.90, p < 001), and Reading Comprehension (t (95) = 5.63, p < 001). Independent t-tests and one-way ANOVA revealed significant variations in students' overall and individual skills ratings in study programs. However, the percentage of students who achieved the required TOEFL scores for admission to both institutions was significantly different. Significance - The findings have major implications for both the lecturers at the two institutions and the designers of TOEFL preparatory programs. This study sheds light on an online TOEFL preparatory course that teaches students through task- and game-based learning. To run this program successfully, teachers' creativity in generating materials (tasks) and incorporating digital technologies is essential.

Global and Local Knowledge for English Language Learning: A Study at a National Police School

This article reports an action research study conducted to solve the problem that twenty-two English language students from a school in Cartagena de Indias considered the current teaching inadequate, and that they needed to develop topics of interest, aural-oral skills, and acquire vocabulary. The authors adjusted their practices, combined global and local themes, and brought multimodal texts to respond to the problem. The action stage of the study required the structuring of the course with themes on the identity of Cartagena de Indias under a Task-Based Learning methodology. The use of information and communication technologies was forced by the challenge of Covid-19, which demanded an abrupt transition from face-to-face to remote teaching and thus the inclusion of computer literacy. The new syllabus included topics close to the identity of the participants such as historical landmarks, economy, and tourism to simulate being a Cartagena tour guide so that learning was contextualized, evocative and expressive. The article presents one of the six workshops followed by an analysis of the data collected. The results of the study show that there were gains in language development attributable to the theme of global-local issues in the workshops that took half a school year for development. The pedagogical innovation also gave positive results in verbal fluency in which technological mediations and Task-Based Learning played an important role.

When Business English Went Virtual

English for Specific Purposes, differently from other academic subjects, has always been compatible with the affordances of technology. The specialised literature has acknowledged well-established branches of language education, such as Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), or Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL), long before the online teaching has been forced upon the systems of education throughout the world following the pandemic. The compatibility between foreign language teaching and computers is not surprising since the former has always searched for authentic immersive experiences that can simulate real-life situations, of which the latter has plenty. The present article concentrates on a particular type of English for Specific Purposes—Business English, which is currently taught at the University of Bucharest to students enrolled in Economics degrees. Beginning with the second semester of the academic year 2019-2020, all classes have been moved online due to the threat posed by the Corona virus. The seminar rooms and lecture rooms have been basically overnight replaced by a multitude of platforms and meeting spaces unknown before to a great many: Zoom, Google Classroom, Moodle, Microsoft teams, to mention just a few. Google Classroom, part of Google Apps for Education, has been one of the most frequently chosen platforms due to its friendly interface and the possibility of holding both a-synchronous and synchronous classes (following the integration of Google Meet). The article discusses the way Google Classroom has been used by language instructors for both the teaching and the final assessment of students’ progress. © 2022, Pro Global Science Association. All rights reserved.

Tools and models for distance teaching in an English Language and Culture university course: the flipped classroom and cooperative learning in a digital environment

The Covid-19 pandemic emergency has contributed to shift towards a more learner-centred teaching approach accelerating an ongoing trend in the university system. Re-arranging teaching materials and devices in different forms using digital tools and delivering online lessons, has been a complex challenge for academics. This necessity to re-adapt and possibly implement and re-shape traditional contents has contributed to consolidate teaching strategies as the flipped classroom (integration of pre-recorded lectures with online synchronous lessons) cooperative learning among peers (both in class and on online platforms with discussion groups), and small group teaching. These teaching strategies have also brought about a general re-thinking of learning strategies on the students' part. To meet students' needs in this emergency situation, materials have also been frequently developed by teachers themselves. Given such premises, this paper reports on the challenging attempt to adopt the aforementioned teaching strategies in an online course (English Language and Culture) held in 2020/21 at the Department of Education Science (Roma Tre University), also providing the students' response to a questionnaire submitted after the completion of the course.

A Model of Task-Based Blended Learning for the EFL Writing Classroom

—Online learning is being implemented due to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is based on the reduction of cases and casualties to the danger and severity of the disease. Though several compliments were encountered in the implementation of this educational process, English instructors at secondary and tertiary levels continue to protest the change. To respond to this dilemma, the development of blended learning (a combination of online and offline learning) emerged. Therefore, this study was intended to develop task-based blended learning for English correspondence education and to identify and explain the learning aspects in the model development. Approximately 120 students from four classes of semester 6 were selected and divided into two groups (experiment and control groups) since a research and development model was used for analysis (Dick & Carey, 1990). The draft model was further validated and piloted for several meetings. The results show effective learning materials containing five sections, namely (1) activity lead, (2) mind mapping, (3) refocusing, (4) writing, and (5) reinforcement. The materials were designed through the provision of tasks in every section, therefore integrating the students’ use of four language skills. In addition, these materials were designed according to lesson plan, learning syntax, and assessment tools. © 2022 ACADEMY PUBLICATION.