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Tuesday, November 15, 2005
THE WHY AND WHEREFORE OF THIS BLOG
Didn' t blog Thursday...just flaked out when I got home and was down all day Friday, still feeling washed out over the weekend and what with writing on my Bham gender paper on Monday and the Webbies conference ppt on Sunday I have been nowhere near blogging....
So there it is, when do researchers not blog, well, when they are sick and exhausted!
Now for the last half of summer term and this fall term, the Doernyei checklist has fallen by the wayside. Why??? I never felt happy checklisting, in spite of it being a way to make nice graphs. Is one reason.
Another is that my aim was to see whether my course bore out Doernyei's claims of changes in motivational strategies according to where in the course you are. Now this was fairly borne out by my first term, which was a conventional building up to the end of term job, although I noticed a concentration of more and more strategies rather than a falling away of the initial ones.
In my second term, however, I got this cyclical pattern over three days, which kept repeating, which is not surprising since the course builds up over three days, thinking of the basics, researching, then presenting on the third day, and there is no final exam, so that each three days acts like a mini-course in itself, and the use of motivation strategies spirals. So it seemed to me that the motivation strategies a teacher uses are not only related to change over time, but to how the course is designed in itself, whether it is linear and crescendo, like my first term, or revolving in spiral cycles, like my presentation second term.
Having noticed that, I kinda lost the interest in just repeating the same thing, so now it's more free entries with a view to looking at what it is I am changing compared to last year, and for what reasons. So the research has shifted away from research into motivation strategies, and into research on course design and innovation.
Renata 2:54 pm
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