Browsing by Subject "Online pedagogy"

The aim of this study is to gain a better understanding of the materials and teaching methods to support the phonetic teaching skills of language teachers. At present at least in Finland, language teachers do not have enough phonetic studies, which makes continuing education planning more important due to new curricula. Curricula emphasize among other things, oral language skills, which contains as an important part teaching of pronounciation. The theoretical part of the work is based on the scientific research of language learning and teaching. As part of the work, an online course was created. The course contents were based on the theoretical part. The contents discussed in the course are related to individuals sounds (International Phonetic Alphabet) and to speech prosody. The online course is structured in University of Helsinki’s online environment Moodle and its pedagogical solutions are build on modularity and collaboration which is emphasized with facilitation. There were 40 language teachers enrolled in the course, of which 31 were online. The elements to be studied in the course were eight different types of content and assignments that language teachers evaluated on the course using embedded electronic questionnaires after completing their teaching module. There were two teaching modules in the course and both utilized the same form. The questionnaires contained numerical and open-ended questions. The questionnaires first mapped the participant's educational background to enable group comparisons, and then the participant's experiences and opinions on the content of the teaching module. The methods were in this experiment qualitative to understand the individual learning experience. The most useful content and assignment types are videos and pictures with text as well as straightforward examples due to their illustrative and inspirational nature. From these participants experienced to receive the most wanted direct instructions, tips, and how to make their own phonetic lessons. Other content and assignments studied are more emphasized by the participant's own reflection and sharing of information with others. These are somewhat more controversial in terms of concreteness, but the results show that more experienced teachers will also benefit from this style of materials and methods. In the further planning of the course, it is important to consider the target group, both in terms of previous phonetic background and teaching experience. The results also highlight the wishes of language-specific phonetics courses, which means closer cooperation between language teachers and phoneticians.