ABSTRACT

Uncovering the Layers of Design Processes of a Global Undergraduate Engineering Course: An Interactional Ethnographic Approach

by

Jenna (Ji Eun) Joo

This dissertation presents an ethnographic study of an instructor’s design logic and thinking underlying a global, multi-country undergraduate engineering design course. The study analyzed how, in what ways, and for what purposes, he continually defined and reformulated what counted as (Heap, 1991) “new” learning opportunities and outcomes for engineering design thinking in the 21st century, through his interactions with globally distributed groups of students and teaching teams (i.e., US, India, Israel, China and South Korea). By examining what was discursively made present to students in moment-by-moment and over-time, I identified the processes and practices that members of the class needed to know, understand, produce and engage in (Heath & Street, 2008) to develop their capacities to work in intercultural contexts on local design problems.

Discourse analysis guided by an Interactional Ethnographic logic-in-use (Birdwhistell, 1977), grounded in a social construction of knowledge perspective (i.e., Green, Skukauskaite, and Baker, 2012; Castanheira, Crawford, Dixon and Green, 2001), framed the ways in which I examined the work of participants, what they oriented to and were held accountable for, and how what counted as this “new” instructional approach was socially constructed (Heap, 1991; Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993, Castanheira et al, 2001). This inquiry process required consideration of multimodal texts available to students in different technology-enabled educational contexts, public (re)presentations of this developing program as well as the construction of transcripts. From this perspective, texts were spoken, written and/or published works (Bakhtin, 1986) constructed by key actors (the designer, the support team, a teaching assistant and students).

The analyses made visible how the instructor’s discourse focused students on taking a problem-oriented approach to resolving challenges in working interculturally on a common task (e.g., the design thinking project). Three inter-related challenges that impacted the collaborative work and opportunities for learning for students were identified that influenced how the course was designed. The first involved the instructor’s desire to engage each participating campus site in face-to-face opportunities from their national sites. The second related to the necessity to address the unique institutional and socio-national contexts of each institution. And, the third, led to the need for the instructor to adapt the planned program to address unanticipated differences in participation due to the holidays in each country.

The present study demonstrates how designing a global course created unanticipated challenges not only for students but also for the instructor, a factor not considered in discussions of innovative design initiatives in higher education. Additionally, this study makes visible how undertaking an Interactional Ethnographic approach, grounded in discourse analysis, makes possible an iterative, recursive and abductive process for constructing warranted understandings of new and emerging curricular design processes in particular interdisciplinary and intercultural (global) contexts.

This paper reports on a study of Chinese speakers who received sustained, systematic online training on English prosody (i.e., pausing, prominence and tone choice) in order to improve their oral speech quality. Twelve students in the experimental group completed the training in four weeks, and another 12 students in the control group did not receive the training. The training modules employed discourse-based materials, and consisted of instruction videos, as well as listening and speaking activities, including learner-created visual pitch contours as instant feedback. The students read a script and gave a one-minute speech on a given topic at the beginning and the end of the study. Four native English speakers judged the speech comprehensibility, fluidity, accent, confidence and attractiveness of the speech. The results show that both groups of students faced challenges of using appropriate prosody when speaking English. The online modules helped the experimental group of students improve on almost all aspects of their script-reading and spontaneous speech. The improvement in comprehensibility and confidence of the spontaneous speech was statistically significant. In contrast, the control group did not show improvement. The students gave high ratings on the helpfulness of the training modules. This study also conducted acoustic analyses of the speech samples, and compared the auditory measures to the acoustic measures of intonation in predicting the speech quality. While both approaches were able to predict some aspects of the speech quality, the auditory approach was able to predict more variables and explain more variances than the acoustic approach. The findings have implications for teaching pronunciation to English learners and developing computer assisted pronunciation training tools.

Technology-Mediated Task-Based Language Teaching is the combination of technology with Task-Based Language Teaching (González-Lloret & Ortega, 2014) and emphasizes authentic communication and holistic language learning opportunities in Second Language Acquisition. Since its introduction almost thirty-five years ago, Task-Based Language Teaching has received widespread attention from researchers in the fields of Second Language education due to its collaborative nature and the interaction and negotiation of meaning that result from its implementation (Robinson, 2011). Task-Based Language Teaching represents a paradigm shift of mainstream views about language teaching from a focus on ‘knowledge of language’ to a pragmatic and experiential focus on ‘achiev[ing] communicative purposes’ (Scarino & Liddicoat, 2009, p. 45). Still, relatively few studies have addressed grammar acquisition in online courses from a Task-Based perspective. The present study sought to examine the effects of an online Task-Based Language Teaching module on the acquisition of direct and indirect object pronouns in Spanish. These grammatical structures are used very frequently by native Spanish speakers, but are less used by Spanish learners because of their difficulty. The main problem is that object clitics in Spanish normally create a structure that appears to be (Subject)-Object-Verb. This can be especially difficult for native speakers of English since these speakers are accustomed to Subject-Verb-Object. Furthermore, Spanish indirect object pronouns look exactly like direct object pronouns except for the third person singular and plural. Hence, learning how to use and distinguish between the direct object and indirect object pronouns is challenging. The results of this study demonstrate the benefits of using an online Task-Based Language Teaching module specially designed for the acquisition of direct and indirect object pronouns in Spanish. Participants in the experimental group used the target structures on many occasions, and their results exceeded those of the control group—the mean of the experimental group was 7.50, whereas the mean of the control group was 1.23. Similarly, students in the experimental group also produced five times more instances of the target structures than students in the control group in an identical final exam activity that both groups had to complete—3.22 vs 0.64, respectively. Thus, the data obtained in this study manifest that technology-mediated TBLT can be particularly valuable in the acquisition of L2 grammar.