Teachers College Tokyo MATESOL

The New School MATESOL

ABSTRACT

The Online Dialogue: Beyond Borders, Beyond Expectations

In this talk, I'll look at how the development of expert knowledge can be tracked through online discourse. Using excerpts from discussions taken from an online MATESOL course in Second Language Acquisition that I designed, wrote, and co-taught, and using sociocultural theory as a lens, I will talk about how teaching online helped me solve what I call the 'fractal problem' of teacher education: How can we help novice teachers learn to teach in transformative ways when the standard MA-level context forces us into an instructor-centered, transmission-based mode? Considering the reservations I had about the potential for 'real' teaching to happen online, it was exciting to see the ways in which online teaching allowed me to see, and participate in, cognitive and professional development in that were happening in highly visible ways. At first, I worried about having to deal with reduced instructor presence and lowered professional satisfaction. Once the class began to take shape, my attention moved to the issue of helping novices engage with new terminology and theories. Without taking a strong stand on the controversy of online versus face-to-face education, I will discuss some of the ways that online teaching helped me to participate in unexpectedly rich and profound dialogue with first-semester MA students. I hope to show how the design of the course, and the way we structured the assignments made the class an experience of sociocultural theory and not just a lecture about it.

BIODATA

Deryn Verity (PhD Linguistics, University of Delaware, MA TESL, St. Michael's College) has been active in the field for nearly 30 years, working as an ESL instructor, teacher trainer, presenter and writer in the U.S., the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Japan. She has served as Associate Editor of the well-respected JALT (Japan Association for Language Teaching) Journal and is currently Professor in the Department of International & English Interdisciplinary Studies at Osaka Jogakuin College in Osaka, Japan. She also holds positions as Lecturer in the Columbia University/Teachers College Tokyo MATESOL program and Instructor in the new online MATESOL program offered by the New School in New York City. Her interests include sociocultural theory, pedagogy and methodology, online education, and language awareness.