Conference Papers

"Listen and click": Enhancing Listening Comprehension Skills in the Language Classroom through the Use of Clickers

Valerie Hascoet — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 06:20:11 PST

The following article relates to an experiment with a group of second year students learning an applied language as a minor subject of their degree. Personal Response Devices were introduced to improve the students’ listening skills by creating more engagement with the course material. It led to 100% participation in class activities run through clickers, facilitated the students in self-evaluating their performance at the tasks and was fun, despite some technical issues occasionally. The experiment fell short however on the reflective aspect. Students were either incapable of or unwilling to reflect on the questions they found difficult. The lecturer was left with improved performances in listening assignments, but no usable feedback on how to support her students in transferring those improved skills to the related area of speaking performance.

There Is No Pperiphery: Globalising Culture and the Cinematographic Language of Cultural Mediation in Modern European Film

Sascha Harris — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 03:42:33 PST

The paper investigates the various narrative and cinematographic strategies employed in Pasolini's 'The Gospel According to St Matthew' (1964), Tarkovsy's 'Andrei Rublev' (1966) and Kieslowski's 'A Short Film about Love' (1988) to correct and undermine a decentred representation which is structured around power-informed centre-periphery relations. It discusses the issue of assumed centrality and modern alienation through instrumentalised, detached perception.

Social Networking Sites: Evaluating and Investigating Their Use in Academic Research

Fiona Redmond — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:30:48 PST

Researchers must collect and analyse new data that will enhance the body of knowledge. It is for this reason that data is of major importance to researchers. All aspects of a research project involve data, from navigating existing data, to understanding how data is used in the world and why it is important to learn to collect data and make predictions. Researchers need to consider the types of data that are possible and examine and weight each option so they can determine what sources of data will answer the research questions or hypotheses. Researchers, who require a large amount of participants to contribute to their data collection and assist in their research, are limited in the choice of current research methods including questionnaires, postal surveys and online surveys and also limited in the number of respondents they can obtain to participate in their research. This paper proposes a new research method through the use of Social Networking Sites (SNS’s). It aims to evaluate and investigate if SNS’s are a feasible method for conducting research and collecting data. SNS’s offer researchers the potential to reach millions of people worldwide quickly and at a low cost. Facebook currently ranked as the second most popular website worldwide has over 400 million active users. MySpace has over 130 million. The majority of the world’s highest ranked SNS’s today provide a developer platform for people to create their own applications. Also within this research is an exploration and investigation into the rational of using SNS’s as a research method through the development of a prototype application integrated with Facebook services.

Peer Assissted Learning for Year 1 Students

Odette Gabaudan — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:30:46 PST

Peer Assisted Learning is a pilot project funded under the Teaching Fellowship scheme. It is aimed at students in the BA International Business and Languages, a programme run by the School of Languages in DIT. The project was initiated in September 2009. Second year students are acting as mentors to first year students by providing them with a broad range of support, from academic content to very practical queries. The School’s objectives in setting up PAL is to facilitate students’ integration into DIT, help first years acquire third level study skills and improve pass rates and retention. It is hoped that PAL will become an embedded feature of the programme. As the year progresses, it has become evident that second years are showing greater commitment and enthusiasm than first years. In consultation with students, the project has evolved from the initial work-plan to include alternative ways to engage 1st years. This case study will present the implementation stages of the process, the means of communication used, the launching events organised, the result of a survey, some statistics and the students’ feedback. It will provide an insight into the challenges encountered and the lessons learned.