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A Socio-Emotional Approach to Building Communities of Learners Online 79 5 A Socio-Emotional Approach to Building Communities of Learners Online Carol Hall, Eric Hall and Lindsay Cooper Introduction It has long been recognized that English language teaching in China is teacher-centred, textbook-based and examination-orientated, with an emphasis on the teaching of grammar and vocabulary at the expense of language skills and communicative competence. Recently however, two events in particular demonstrated the urgency with which the Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE) would need to introduce policies which would require teachers to shift the emphasis from the grammar-translation method to pedagogical approaches aimed to develop the communicative competencies of listening and speaking. These two events are the entry of China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and the announcement that Beijing would host the Olympic Games in 2008. The requirement to supply large numbers of confident, fluent English language speakers to business communities nationwide necessitated an urgent and wholesale reform of the national curriculum for language education from primary to tertiary. The MoE’s New Curriculum for the teaching of English language (see Spencer-Oatey, this volume, pp. 4–5), with its emphasis on communicative competence, demands that teachers re-engineer the way they design and deliver language classes, and the incorporation of ICT as a learning resource is seen as integral to the process. In order to deliver the reform agenda, teachers are required to undergo extensive in-service training, which demands of them no less than a seismic shift in the way that they conceptualize and carry out their role. It is also recognized that Web-based courses of study will be needed to augment the opportunities for traditional forms of face-to-face (F2F) in-service training, given the sweeping nature of the reforms and the enormity of the task which lies ahead. For the profession, adopting a learner-centred approach to language teaching will mean undergoing a psychological as well as a pedagogical transformation process. Development of the MA eELT (e-English language teaching) was in part a project designed to produce examples of Web-based advanced teacher training materials which 80 Carol Hall, Eric Hall and Lindsay Cooper are capable of delivering on the professional transformation agenda for teachers at the tertiary level. The Personal Development for Professional Purposes element within the master’s programme was designed to specifically address the psychological and emotional demands that role transformation will make on teachers. But exactly who were our target learners, and what conclusions might we draw from knowing more about their social and emotional needs as well as their professional needs in a period of fast-paced educational reform? Demographic data suggested that the typical learner profile for a teacher wishing to undertake a Web-based course of advanced professional study, such as the MA eELT, would be a mid-career, female language tutor at tertiary level with a family and limited time to devote to study but with a strong desire for career advancement (Gu, Hall, Sinclair and McGrath 2005). A study (Chen 2006) carried out with a group of Chinese secondary school English language teachers, evaluating online learning materials at undergraduate level, provided a helpful reminder that, since teachers are the target learners of web-based teacher education, there is a need to understand their culture and thoughts so that suitable e-learning materials can be designed and delivered successfully. (Chen 2006: 1) In addition, Chen’s study revealed that what these learners said they wanted from Webbased study was: • a clear relevance to their own context; • the capacity to facilitate learner autonomy and reflection; • the opportunity to learn by sharing. This same study revealed that both language teachers and their online tutors felt that ice-breaking and self-introduction tasks were needed in addition to the teaching of subjectspecific material when working online. Such affective tasks would have the potential to shorten the psychological if not the physical distance between people and foster a community where shared learning could take place. Salmon (2005) notes that distance is not merely a geographical construct (distance in place and isolation from other learners) but a psychological one (distance in thoughts, feelings and aloneness). McConnell (2006) argues that learning in itself is a social process and therefore learning communities have the potential to foster both co-operative and collaborative forms of learning. Sclater and Bolander (2004) agree and point out that ‘community’ by itself does not guarantee production of co-operative or...

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