Universitetet i Agder: UiA Journal System
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A Bigram-Based Exploration of Phraseological Development in Norwegian Secondary School Students’ Writing in English L2
No full textThis study investigates phraseological units produced by Norwegian secondary school students (aged 13 to 17) writing in English L2. The study employs association measure as a way of calculating the collocational strength and certainty of words in word pairs (bigrams) in the L2 learners’ writing. The association measures MI and t-score have been shown to be reliable measures for telling learner language apart from native language. Durrant and Schmitt (2009) and Granger and Bestgen (2014) found a higher proportion of high MI-scoring bigrams to be a marker of more advanced language, native or nativelike, while a higher proportion of high t-scores was associated with less advanced language. The present study includes language from a lower proficiency level than has previously been investigated. The pattern of association measures found for intermediate Norwegian learners of English does not match the previous findings for advanced learners. Instead, an initial decline is uncovered, in that the students produce a higher proportion of bigrams with high MI scores and high t-scores in the first year than they do one and two years later. At higher levels of proficiency, the scores increase again, the pattern resembling previous findings. The article considers possible explanations and discusses applications for teaching
Written corrective feedback in the lower secondary EFL classroom: exploring questions of what, how and why in observed and self-reported teacher practice
No full textFor decades, scholarly debates have been concerned with the effect of corrective feedback (CF), both written and oral, on L2 language development. Much of the research that supports written corrective feedback (WCF) comes from short-term focused feedback studies, representing a type of feedback practice not necessarily applicable in classroom contexts. This has pointed to a need for more classroom research of authentic WCF and its effect on written learner language. Attempting to explore authentic classroom data longitudinally, this article presents a Norwegian case study of two English teachers’ WCF provided to three students during three years of lower secondary EFL instruction. The student texts are part of the TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) corpus and were collected from obligatory mock exams. The texts came with teacher WCF as well as revised versions. Semi-structured interviews with the teachers provided information about the teachers’ practices and beliefs related to WCF. The collected data was analyzed qualitatively and later discussed against cognitive, motivational, and sociocultural theories. The process of tracking changes in error patterns confirmed some of the issues with using accuracy and global error scores as a measurement for improvement and development, interpreted as proof of learning in language acquisition research. The data further suggests that students do not engage with feedback enough to benefit from its learning potential
Comparing language ideology, policy and pedagogy – implications for student outcomes in CLIL and immigrant education
No full textAs linguistic diversity is increasing in many classrooms, teachers across disciplines and educational levels are more often faced with students of different language backgrounds and needs. Concomitant with educational initiatives to develop students’ foreign language skills and multilingual repertoires, urgent needs to fast forward immigrant students’ proficiency in the language of instruction are calling for the attention of educators and policy makers. By comparing and contrasting educational contexts involving content and language integrated learning (CLIL) and mainstream education of newly arrived immigrant students (NAS), this article seeks to bring language policy and its underlying ontology to the fore, highlighting its implications for pedagogy and educational outcomes, as well as for individual students and society. The focus is on the role of language in relation to content, hence a discussion on different variants of language integrated approaches, i.e. CLIL, English medium instruction (EMI) and immersion, to see how the education of immigrants relate to those. The article lends examples from a Swedish comparative research study on teachers’ experiences with language learners in CLIL and among NAS. The contexts differ in some respects, but as this text will argue, the questions of shared character and interest are many, some of which refer to matters of fairness and comparability in education. Teachers in both contexts are struggling with how to handle limitations in students’ academic language skills and students not learning disciplinary content with the same depth and complexity as they might have done if the students had been using their first language, issues which are emphasized in assessment. At the same time as curricula and assessment imply standardized learning outcomes and target language, current discourse advocates translanguaging, leaving many teachers disillusioned as they find incompatibility between students’ flexible use of their linguistic resources and standardized assessment expectations. 
Leveraging a Diverse Collaboration in Tertiary Education to Develop Capability for Workplace Innovation
No full textRecent developments in tertiary education are demonstrating teaching and learning methods to develop students’ capability for employee-led Workplace Innovation. In this article, we describe an international collaboration to develop shared learning resources and activities in workplace innovation for adaptation in diverse tertiary education contexts. We are intentionally seeking out additional collaborating institutions that differ in mission, size, location and student demographics, to leverage our team’s diversity and encourage innovation.
When shared learning resources and activities are to be used in a diverse contexts, some core principles underlying instructional success must also be shared in order to ensure adaptations do not remove key properties. We outline four instructional principles underlying the learning design and illustrate how these principles are applied in our current learning resources.
We then describe some of the ways that these shared resources have been adapted for different tertiary education environments. We also discuss some of the benefits emerging from the collaboration, including how the inclusion of new resources targeting specific work domains and the transfer of new teaching and learning ideas across contexts.
We conclude by describing some of the ways we are also collaborating with workplace partners, to ensure that our graduates have the capabilities needed to contribute to workplace innovation practice and to help advance the workplace innovation capability of their own employees
Employee Participation, Digital Sophistication and Innovation Performance: Analysis Based on the Finnish MEADOW Survey
No full textThe results of the Finnish MEADOW survey of 2021–2022, comprising responses of management from 1,106 companies, show that nearly half of Finnish companies employing ten or more people had produced a new or significantly improved product or service during the last two years. Of these companies, almost half had produced products or services new also to the market. Both the level of digital sophistication and the extent of employee participation in development are positively associated with the company’s innovation performance after all other factors in the multinominal regression analysis are controlled. The odds ratios in the regression models are higher for innovations new to the market than innovations new only for the company. Broad employee participation shows the highest odds ratios of all variables included in the regression models for both types of innovation. As also companies’ cooperation networks and customer involvement can play a role in innovations, we analysed the combined effect of the above four factors on innovation. A clear positive combined effect for both innovations new to the market and new only for the company was detected, suggesting that it is difficult for companies to build innovation superiority based on technological ability alone – or any other single factor – and that broad employee participation in development is an essential part of the portrait of an innovative company also in the digital age
Exploring the challenges and facilitators that impact the experiences of being an older female worker in the European labour market: Findings from a rapid review of literature
No full textOlder women make a significant contribution to the labour market yet still experience negative workplace impacts. We undertook a rapid review of literature to assess the current experiences of older female workers in the European labour market with the aim to inform policy innovation and service development that improves the working lives of older women in Europe.
Electronic databases including Business Source Complete, Social Policy and Practice and PubMED were searched. 4797 records were identified, of which 24 full-text reports were included.
Compared to men, older women were found to experience more adverse health impacts as a result of work-related stress. Older women bear a greater share of caring responsibilities which has a negative impact on their health. A lack of support for menopausal symptoms in the workplace often prompted early retirement for older female workers. Income and role disparities between men and women were identified, with women having relatively discontinuous employment histories and lower pension funds due to a higher burden of unpaid, domestic labour throughout their life course. This has a cumulative effect on their income, their role and position at work, and their ability to retire. Older women also reported experiencing workplace discrimination, and lack of autonomy and job control, and less training and developement opportunities. Flexible working was found to be contested terrain, with it being a means to support older women to maintain careers but also resulting in poorer career outcomes
Building Intercultural Competences for Students Who Study Abroad
No full textPeople do not always match one’s prior expectations, and people from countries different from one’s own often do not conform to our stereotypical expectations. This is no less true for students who choose to study abroad as part of their degree programmes. While students may be interculturally competent in one context, they may be considerably less so in another. A single semester exchange can expose them to a wide array of encounters for which they are unprepared, both at their host universities and in their destination countries.
There is much discussion about how best to help intercultural learning in the context of mobility. This paper draws on findings from third-level incoming and outgoing student mobilities over a four-year period. The purpose is to highlight insights into the cognitive and emotive challenges, motivations, and reflections that students experience before, during, and after studying abroad. Developing and implementing an online platform for intercultural training will enable future exchange students to prepare and engage actively in all three phases of this journey. It is expected that active and voluntary participation and engagement in suchtraining will help to promote students´ plurilingual and intercultural competences as well as trigger personal and professional growth. This has the potential to be a win-win experience not just for the individual student but also for their subsequent career journey when navigating a knowledge-based global economy
Design and construction of the Tracking Written Learner Language (TRAWL) Corpus: A longitudinal and multilingual young learner corpus
No full textThis article describes the design and construction of the Tracking Written Learner Language (TRAWL) Corpus. The corpus combines several features that are all rare for learner corpora: it is longitudinal, following individual pupils over several years; it has data from young learners from school years 5 to 13 (ages 10–18); it is multilingual, containing learners’ texts in several L3s (French, German and Spanish), L2 English and L1 Norwegian; and it includes teacher comments on a number of the texts. In addition, some of the texts exist in both a first and a second revised version, all tied to a rich set of meta-data. Not only does such a corpus offer new possibilities for research on language acquisition in general; it can also be used to provide valuable insights for teachers, teacher training and policymaking within the national context of Norway. In this article, we describe the design of the TRAWL Corpus and outline its uses and benefits for the research community. We also describe the compilation process in the hope that it may inspire and enable others to build similar corpora for their own national contexts