George MacLean

University of the Ryukyus

George MacLean is a professor at the University of Ryukyus, in Okinawa Japan. He has taught at primary-junior high and university levels in Japan and the international school system. He has given over fifty workshops and research presentations in over a dozen countries over the past decade. He serves on editorial and review boards for several conferences and educational journals. His research areas include second language acquisition (SLA), as well as ICT implementation and use.


Sessions

Feedback Procedures to Promote Reflective Learning

College & University Education
Sat, Nov 21, 13:25-14:55 JST

In this poster presentation I will discuss using a reflective learning environment via (a) the delivery of near-immediate teacher and peer feedback and (b) subsequently requiring students to submit reflections about their learning experiences using cloud computing. Notably, I will discuss (a) whether students were able to understand corrective feedback about several targeted grammatical forms (such as the -s morpheme), and (b) whether they subsequently demonstrated correct knowledge of the linguistic form (uptake).

Peer feedback for group activity assessment

Oral communication is a fundamental aspect of most language programs and this usually involves group activities where students interact with each other in the target language. Still, teachers can’t be everywhere at once to evaluate and ensure that all goals for a group activity have been properly attended to by every student. Several criteria should be met, such as (1) Did the student prepare adequately? (2) Was their response to the discussion prompt level-appropriate? (3) Did they use the target language to the best of their abilities? (4) Did they interact with other group members appropriately? In the absence of methodical procedures and guidelines to communicate this to students, their subsequent assessment for such efforts can appear whimsical or even arbitrary and de-motivating. This presentation will discuss vetted-peer feedback rubrics and their use via cloud-computing to timely and effectively deliver peer and teacher feedback to students about their performance in group activity situations. The outcome for participants of this presentation should be (a) better awareness of how to articulate and implement peer feedback during group activities, and (b) how to make use of free cloud computing applications such as forms and spreadsheets to quickly compile and disseminate such feedback.