This research explored the congruence and disparity between teachers' and students' attitudes towards French as a second language (L2) teaching strategies in a non-target language classroom context in the USA. The findings suggest students' and teachers' attitudes towards the direct and indirect teaching strategies were generally consistent, but not in terms of the collaborative teaching strategies. The findings also indicate that the beginner and elementary level students held different preferences for all the three teaching strategies. The underlying reasons could be learners' different language proficiency levels, and how well teachers execute these different teaching strategies in class. This study concludes with some implications for foreign language teacher education.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2015.1044228]

In Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms where students' L2 proficiency has not reached the threshold level, teachers have been observed to use L1 to assist students in grasping specific technical terms and abstract concepts. It is argued to be a 'realistic' approach to the learning problems caused by students' limited L2 proficiency, particularly in English-as-a-foreign-language contexts. Nonetheless, researchers have also warranted 'judicious' and 'principled' use of L1 so that both content and language learning are facilitated. The question thus remains is whether teachers can use L1 appropriately to suit their students' needs. This study seeks to address this question. It includes data from 30 Grade 10 lessons in Hong Kong CLIL classrooms, where students' L2 proficiency varied considerably. Using both quantitative and qualitative analyses, this study shows that when teaching students with limited L2 proficiency, teachers used a significant proportion of L1 in lessons to explain the subject content, interact with students and develop students' L2 metalinguistic awareness. In contrast, with students highly proficient in L2, teachers used little L1, mainly to provide translation equivalents for L2 subject-specific vocabulary items. This study thus shows that teachers seemed to be sensitive when making use of students' existing linguistic repertoires.
[Copyright of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2014.988112]

VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Environment) is a teacher-facilitated pedagogical approach to integrating constructivist online game-based learning into formal curriculum teaching in school education. This paper reports a case study on the implementation of VISOLE in secondary Geography education. We compared the pedagogical effectiveness of VISOLE and the traditional classroom teaching approach, in terms of students' knowledge acquisition with respect to a formal curriculum. One hundred and ninety-eight students from top, middle, and bottom academic-banding schools were selected and divided into three experimental groups and three control groups to participate in the research. Results showed that, in comparison with the traditional approach, VISOLE had a positive pedagogical effect on both low and moderate academic-achievement students, but not on high academic-achievement students. The findings shed light on enhancing the existing design of VISOLE, and provide researchers and educators with new insights into harnessing online games in formal school education in practice.
[Copyright of The Curriculum Journal is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2015.1018915]

This article reports the results of an attempt to integrate a collaborative technology, a wiki, into learning within a course in a teacher education program based on social constructivist learning theory. The current study aimed to explore student-teacher acceptance of the proposed pedagogy and to identify specific learning style preferences that might be favourable to accepting the proposed pedagogy. A total of 56 student teachers studying a General Education (GE) course in a teacher education institute in Hong Kong participated in the study. They completed a number of collaborative tasks using a wiki during the learning process, and were then invited to complete a questionnaire designed to solicit their perception on the usefulness of wikis and their attitudes towards using a wiki, and 39 of them also returned a learning styles inventory which was used to identify the learning styles profile of the student-teacher samples. The findings reveal favourable perceptions of the use of a wiki as a collaborative learning tool in the course. Qualitative data collected from open-ended questions also reflects similar favourable results. Active learners were also found to be significantly different from reflective learners in accepting the wiki as a learning tool.
[Copyright of Australasian Journal of Educational Technology is the property of ASCILITE]

In this paper, an excerpt of teacher–student interaction in an EFL junior secondary science classroom in Hong Kong is analysed using the conversation analytic method of sequential analysis. The fine-grained analysis reveals that in the teacher's effort to engage her students in the co-construction of a scientific proof, the students' familiar everyday discourses (e.g. students' examples and experiences as expressed in their familiar language) need to be allowed to play a significant role. It also shows how translanguaging can be well-coordinated with multimodal practices (using blackboard drawings, gestures) to facilitate students' meaning-making in the inquiry-based teacher–student dialogue.
[Copyright of International Journal of Bilingual Education & Bilingualism is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2014.988113]