Melinda Ann Dooly Owenby - Böcker

Based on a research project supported by the European Foundation, this book explores how primary and secondary students in four different European countries view theirs and the world’s future. The results indicate that there is a gap between students’ perspectives about the future and a clear pedagogical base for helping students confront many issues that are significant to them. The importance of ensuring students become critically aware citizens and helping them develop the ability and skills necessary for facing the challenges of the future are patent. This book spells out specific ways in which the issues which emerged from the study can be approached from diverse fields (geography, language learning and arts and crafts). It also discusses some cross-disciplinary educational issues relevant to all teachers – general education and cross-disciplinary, as well as offering two proposals on how teachers can count on sufficient psychological support to face the challenges of teaching in an increasingly complex environment and promote cooperative behaviour in the classroom.

This book provides an accessible introduction to some of the methods and theoretical approaches for investigating foreign language (FL) interaction and exchange in online environments. Research approaches which can be applied to Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) are outlined, followed by a discussion of the way in which tools and techniques for data-collection in diverse online contexts can contribute to our understanding of online foreign language interaction. The compilation of chapters presents a comprehensive overview of key issues in virtual, intercultural and multimodal research contexts and gives insight into the particular challenges and situations which this area of language learning implies.Researching Online Foreign Language Interaction and Exchange addresses the needs of researchers and newcomers to the area who are hoping to learn about the current state of the field by providing overviews of varying approaches and extensive literature review as well as extracts of real data to illustrate the theories, methods or issues in question.