IPads in the foreign language classroom: A learner’s perspective

Informal discussions with final-year undergraduates majoring in French as a foreign language in a Malaysian public university revealed that they lacked confidence in their language proficiency. We believed that they needed some form of recognition and therefore developed a model of online peer-tutoring. In this study, nine final-year learners were selected to become online peer-tutors for 18 second-year learners. This article explains the selection procedure and the peer-tutoring model implemented in a reading and writing course. It also reviews the selection criteria based on the analysis of the peer-tutors' performances during the tutoring. The data consists of the results from online participation monitoring, self-reflective questionnaires and surveys. The findings were congruent with current research on peer-tutoring and validated the selection criteria (i.e., quantity of messages, quality of contributions, linguistic proficiency and accuracy of objectives). The peer-tutoring model was well received and benefited all participants. Its implementation revealed some traits in the tutor-tutee relationship specific to the Malaysian context.

In Oman, novice in-service primary English teachers struggle with the theoretical content of professional training programs, which impedes knowledge acquisition and transfer into teaching practices. This research stems from the benefits of continuous professional development, communities of practice, and practical and reflective learning on teachers’ exposure to teaching methods resulting in improved teaching skills and techniques. Considering the affordances of mobile learning, Padlet training was designed as an alternative to face-to-face programs during the Covid-19 pandemic to support in-service primary teachers with online synchronous teaching. The objectives were to improve participation, content acquisition, and knowledge transfer into teaching practices. Six novice Omani in-service English primary teachers participated in training for seven months. The data from semi-structured interviews, observations, interactions, peer feedback, and teaching e-portfolios were analysed with a systematic grounded theory three-step coding, which were performed until model emergence and saturation. The findings confirmed the contributions of the Padlet training to the enhancement of content acquisition and transfer due to ubiquitous access, simplified multimedia content, hands-on practice, instructor-peer feedback, and digital self-reflective e-portfolios. The teachers were enthusiastic about the program, which led to a virtual circle. Participants viewed Padlet as an engaging platform to host a community, access, create, and share content. Ubiquitous access and support within a peer community resulted in regular attendance, engaged participation, and increased confidence, which led to improved content acquisition and content transfer. The resulting Padlet training model presented in this article could be replicated to design mobile professional development training programs in similar contexts.

Foundation students need to pass English proficiency courses before joining their Bachelor program. Omani students are English as foreign language (EFL) learners. Therefore, acquiring reading skills is crucial in unlocking their academic performance. The researchers implemented an online intensive reading club seeking to engage unmotivated students into improving their reading through task-based learning from the ReadTheory website. The objectives were twofold, first to identify factors of engagement in the online intensive reading club leading to improved reading skills, and second to explore how these factors could instill long-term reading motivation. A three-cycle action research was conducted over six months with 10 participants. The systematic thematic analysis of observations, discussions, semi-structured interviews, and artifacts resulted in an in-depth understanding of the demotivation, engagement, learning and acquisition processes. Participation to the intensive reading club resulted in heightened motivation and improved reading skills due to the students’ active engagement in the Readtheory enhanced intensive reading tasks. Authentic and meaningful materials, immediate individual performance reports on reading skills and progress contributed to increased engagement, yielding long-term intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation. The resulting Online intensive reading model will benefit teachers, students, and stakeholders seeking to motivate EFL students to read in the target language.

This article describes the use of action research to increase trustworthiness through a non-judgmental approach. Two foreign language lecturers implemented an action research to improve their teaching with the use of Facebook and mobile devices. In order to remain open to all possible interpretation of the events and to incite their students to provide them with honest feedback, they openly adopted a non-judgmental stance. As a result, students freely revealed how they used funds which were given to them to access mobile Internet. Findings showed that not all students used the money as was anticipated by the lecturers, and that they spoke without restraints on the matter. This behavior has led the researchers to reflect on how this stance helped validate the trustworthiness of the data for the research, and encouraged them to focus on not judging their informants.