LAUSR

While planning workshops for postgraduates on research ethics recently, I navigated as usual the learning design circuit as I pondered how to generate interaction with second-language English speakers. I tracked between Polanyi’s tacit and explicit notions (Polanyi, 1983) in trying to design encounters which would speak to their tacit and culturally based understanding while developing the students’ competence in explicit presentation. In the light of self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2008) I was trying to fulfil the students’ expressed needs for practice in presentation but within a safe supported group coming largely from Chinese and Arabic speaking cultures. I had plenty of opportunities to reflect on the importance of language as sense-making signs which indicated much more than the concepts conveyed. We were also face-to-face with the enabling function of language, something that the CLIL paradigm uses in its dual approach to content and language learning (Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) definitions are helpfully discussed in Cenoz, Genesee, & Gorter, 2014). We discussed language in the context of research, in particular, the way questions demonstrate researcher bias and values, and the complexities of interpretative research when moving in and out of the translated text. How we gain a mutual and consensual understanding of a term, a concept, a phrase, will matter in the development of data which, in the Polanyi sense will never be “objective”. It will also matter when we consider interactive learning. Allwright (1984) takes as axiomatic that interaction in the classroom involves not just management of interaction by the teacher but also the management of interaction by each participating student. This joint management he sees as fundamental to classroom pedagogy, arguing that social interaction is co-produced (p. 159) and socially constructed, classifying that interaction – particularly between teacher and student as compliance, navigation, negotiation and direction. These are helpful terms which we can relate specifically to online interaction and blended interaction. Interaction online is often reduced to pre-planned feedback, to asynchronous discussion and to brief sporadic webinars, where control of screen and turn is generally directed by the teacher. Learner compliance is the usual result. So we might usefully consider how learner navigation (in Allwright’s sense this is a dialogue as the learner seeks to move through content and overcome obstacles to their understanding) and learner negotiation (of content and dialogue with the teacher) may be facilitated in online or blended learning with technology. Personalised learning environments (PLEs) may create affordances for “navigation”, as learners pull in resources which amplify concepts and tools which allow them to follow their own pathways towards learning outcomes. This would depend on whether the designer of those PLEs can either second-guess what diverse learners may need, or has provided sufficient autonomy to the learner for their own PLE to be developed. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) (especially x-MOOCs) offer fewer “navigation” options, given the largely automated choices presented to participants. CMOOCs i.e. those which are primarily participant-led through social media, would seem to offer scope for “negotiation” in interactive learning, but are more costly and time-intensive of resource than x-MOOCs, where the massive volume has been at the expense of personal support and feedback. But how are these online approaches mediated by language? Once we reduce geographical boundaries through learning technology we immediately hit cultural and linguistic ones. Whether or not English is used as a primary instructional language, understanding and fluency will vary