Developing Autonomy and Strategic Competence: Hypermedia Designed to Explore, Develop and Exercise Vocabulary Learning Strategies in a Core Course of the English Degrees in the National University of Cordoba, Argentina.

Congreso; DH 2020 (Digital Humanities 2020); 2020

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations

Although Argentinian tertiary education, mostly at the level of state-funded national universities, remains rather traditional in its practices as most degrees are still mainly rooted in face-to-face instruction, individual lecturers -formerly characterized as lone rangers (Bates, 2000)- and courses have begun to explore the potential of the digital humanities to enhance the processes of teaching and learning. The implementation of a digital humanities approach, in turn, seems particularly apt for foreign language classrooms, especially those that aim at helping students maximize their linguistic proficiency so that they can become expert bilingual linguists. This is the case of five of the core courses entitled English Language I-V at the School of Languages of the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba in Argentina. These subjects span along a 5-year programme which grants degrees in EFL teaching, translating and research, and they depart from a pre-intermediate level towards an academic level that should attain standards in keeping with international research requirements at a postgraduate level (C2+ in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). Given the massive nature of face-to-face classes and the temporal and spatial constraints faced, work on autonomous learning and learning strategies becomes a prime concern and objective in these courses. Indeed, in the core subject English Language III, the need for the development of autonomous tools and strategic competence is quite apparent as one major objective pertains to the acquisition of vast quantities of vocabulary specific to content areas such as linguistics and science in general. The affordances inherent in hypermedia seem ideally suited to the development of autonomy and strategic behaviour. This presentation will explore the main underlying pedagogical assumptions that guided the design of a hypermedia instructional material aimed at exploring, developing end exercising vocabulary learning strategies in the context of English Language III at the School of Languages. The taxonomy by Norbert Schmitt (Schmitt & McCarthy, 1997) was enlarged and updated to successfully scaffold individual and collaborative work towards the acquisition and practice of a wide repertoire of vocabulary learning strategies. The design of the material sprang from an identified need as part of an action-research cycle (Wallace, 2007) and from the desire to complement face-to face instruction and to enhance learning as part of a dissertation for an MA in technology-mediated education.References:Bates, T. (2000). Managing Technological Change: Strategies for College and University Leaders. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Schmitt, N., & McCarthy, M. (Eds.). (1997). Vocabulary: Description, acquisition and pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Shapiro, A. M. (2008). Hypermedia design as learner scaffolding. Education Technology Research and Development, 56(1): 29-44.Wallace, M.J. (2007). Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.