Strategies and Challenges to Teaching Students with Special Needs during a Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to immediate school closures resulting in online learning. Online learning under such circumstances has presented challenges for teachers of students with mild to extensive support needs. The current study interviewed twenty special education teachers about the strategies they used when teaching online and the challenges they faced. Teachers discussed several strategies including the use of direct instruction, providing active engagement, caregiver involvement, and their frequent use of informal assessments. Challenges included time constraints and student inattention. Findings of this study can be used to inform strategies to use when teaching students with special needs online and in future online emergency teaching environments.

Policies, Practices, and Protocols for the Implementation of Technology Into Language Learning

Many research studies show that the use of technology inside and outside classrooms makes teaching and learning more engaging and motivating. Technology can provide learners with endless opportunities and can improve the learning experience, simplify access to educational resources, enhance autonomous learning, meet individual learning needs, and prepare the learners for future career success when using it to foster 21st-century skills. However, the range and number of technologies currently available can yield challenges for educators if they do not know how to effectively integrate them into their teaching pedagogy. "Policies, Practices, and Protocols for the Implementation of Technology Into Language Learning" discusses the skills necessary for successful technology use in education and examines technology tools that assist in teaching different languages with a focus on English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Covering a range of topics such as reading, writing, and integrated language skills, this book is ideal for instructors, policymakers, administrators, researchers, practitioners, academicians, and students.

COVID-19 Outbreak, State of a Questionable Dilemma, or a Learning Escape: Second Language Acquisition Within Virtual Learning and Social Contact

Digital learning, social contact and COVID-19 outbreak are three different phrases have been often heard, read or spoken about since 2020. Undoubtedly, these phrases have brought fear of uncertainty, but also hope to find a new perspective to keep life matters on-going including learning in general, and language acquisition in particular. In order to find the impact of virtual learning and social contact on second language acquisition, a total of 389 second language university students have either online surveyed or been interviewed to validate the results and avoid any misleading. After analyzing the data, results revealed that virtual learning has given the learner a chance to develop understanding of different aspects of learning a second language. Flexibility, free-learning, and richness of knowledge source are positive aspects of virtual learning. Likewise, social contact has an essential role in deepen the understanding of contextual use, semantics and lexis, and other aspects of second language acquisition. Interestingly, both social and virtual aspects of learning motivate the learner to reach language mastery. Therefore, the findings urge the use of virtual learning regarding social contact in developing linguistic skills in second language acquisition. Further insights are recommended to enrich the future research in this topic.

Culturally Sustaining Web 2.0 Technology Use in the Pacific: Innovations from American Samoa and Hawai'i

This study takes a transnational and collaborative approach to explore how Pacific Island educators are using web 2.0 technology to enhance instruction and facilitate culturally sustaining learning opportunities for emergent bilingual and multilingual students. It is also an analysis of the digital divide for young adolescent users due to linguistic, economic, and geographic barriers. Two middle level education vignettes are presented--one from American Samoa and one from Hawai'i. First, we explore the areas of technology use, collaborative learning, and culturally sustaining education within our unique Pacific contexts. Each vignette consists of an overview of the technology usage within our Pacific contexts, connections to "The Successful Middle School: This We Believe," results, and next steps. This study caters to educators working with multilingual and multicultural populations and contributes to the knowledge base of culturally sustaining pedagogy in middle level online learning environments.

Parental Report via a Mobile App in the Context of Early Language Trajectories: StarWords Study Protocol.

Social sciences researchers emphasize that new technologies can overcome the limitations of small and homogenous samples. In research on early language development, which often uses parental reports, taking the testing online might be particularly compelling. Due to logistical limitations, previous studies on bilingual children have explored the language development trajectories in general (e.g., by including few and largely set apart timepoints), or focused on small, homogeneous samples. The present study protocol presents a new, on-going study which uses new technologies to collect longitudinal data continuously from parents of multilingual, bilingual, and monolingual children. Our primary aim is to establish the developmental trajectories in Polish-British English and Polish-Norwegian bilingual children and Polish monolingual children aged 0-3 years with the use of mobile and web-based applications. These tools allow parents to report their children's language development as it progresses, and allow us to characterize children's performance in each language (the age of reaching particular language milestones). The project's novelty rests on its use of mobile technologies to characterize the bilingual and monolingual developmental trajectory from the very first words to broader vocabulary and multiword combinations.

The Effect of Flipped Classroom on Iranian Adolescents: Elementary EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Recall and Retention

Vocabulary as an inseparable part of language learning has a vital role in communication, which requires to be taught in new approaches. A quasi-experimental method was used to achieve the aims of the current study. In doing this, 48 Iranian female adolescent elementary learners (13–17) were assigned based on the Oxford Quick Placement Test from 70 female students to take part in 4 sessions of treatment. The participants were randomly divided into two groups: an experimental group (n = 24) and a control group (n = 24). The experimental group was taught using the flipped classroom, while the control group was exposed to the conventional methods. Research instruments involving an English language placement test, vocabulary pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed test (the study lasted for 9 weeks). A list of 28 target words was given to both groups. Words were selected by the Lawshe content validity ratio (CVR) and content validity index (CVI) to have validity. The findings of ANCOVA indicated that conducting the flipped classrooms has significant impacts on Iranian adolescent elementary students’ vocabulary recall and retention. Hence, it is an applicable approach that carries important implications for teachers, foreign language syllabus designers, and curriculum planners.

Promoting Precision in a Virtual Environment

During a time when students are accessing instruction virtually because of COVID-19, reflecting on the sixth of the Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP 6) is a vital step for educators to take. Although the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (NGA Center and CCSSO 2010) identifies SMP 6 as Attend to precision, associated expertise includes more than "calculating accurately and efficiently" (p. 7). SMP 6 also states that mathematically proficient students "communicate precisely to others," using "clear definitions in discussion with others and in their own reasoning" (NGA Center and CCSSO 2010, p. 7). Applying exact terminology allows students not only to form and support conjectures but also to engage in mathematical discourse. This, in turn, results in enhanced conceptual understanding because mathematical discourse has been linked to the unveiling of concepts and the debunking of misconceptions (Thompson and Gay 2020). This article describes an eye-opening experience, during which the authors realized that their methods of vocabulary instruction in the virtual environment needed to be revised. Data were collected in the third author's fourth-grade virtual classroom from January through February 2021. The first and third authors were co-teachers, whereas the second author assisted with instructional planning. All students were native English speakers;however, featured practices may also support the cognitive academic language proficiency development of English language learners in a virtual setting.

Digital Vocabulary Class in English for Railway Mechanical Technology

The need to develop online classes in the COVID-19 pandemic era was undeniable. This study aimed to investigate students' learning achievement and their feedback in digital vocabulary class, which utilized Kahoot! and Socrative as drilling practice tools. It was quasi-experimental research on first-year students of the Railway Mechanical Technology program in Indonesian Railway Polytechnic (N=48). The primary data was gathered from vocabulary pretest and posttest. Then, the test results were analyzed using paired t-test, Pearson r correlation, and Cohen d coefficient. The supporting data were collected by giving a questionnaire to know students' feedbacks. The results revealed that the digital class effectively improved students' learning vocabulary achievement in English for railway mechanical technology. The questionnaire results showed positive feedback from the students in learning through digital platforms.

Teaching Grammar and Vocabulary in COVID-19 Times: Approaches Used in Online Teaching in Polish Schools during a Pandemic

Technology has been called to the rescue on a number of occasions, be it in large classes, under-resourced contexts, after earthquakes or other natural disasters. The COVID-19 pandemic which struck the whole world in Spring 2020 afterwards necessitated a sudden shift from face-to-face to distance teaching. With no preparation, no training and very little support from the state, language teachers had to find their own ways transferring language instruction to the online medium. This paper explores the modes, approaches, affordances and obstacles of COVID-era grammar and vocabulary teaching in Poland. Apart from examining the shape of online teaching from two perspectives (student teachers and school teachers), the study confronts the approaches used in Polish schools against well-established models: stages of CALL (Warschauer & Healey, 1998, Bax, 2003), SAMR (Puentedura, 2006) and Skills pyramid (Hampel & Stickler, 2005).