Lim, Fei Victor

With the COVID-19 pandemic and the advancements made in digital technology, there is a growing interest amongst educators in how to design online learning experiences for students. This chapter introduces the role of teachers as designers of learning and discusses the importance of their use of semiotic technologies for the representation of knowledge, enactment of pedagogic relations, and the organization of students’ learning. It also explores how students make meaning using words and other multimodal resources during online learning. In particular, the chapter focuses on the use of semiotic technologies of social media, using the example of Edmodo, for the design of synchronous online learning experiences in higher education. Based on reflections on the design and implementation of the lessons, the chapter reports on how synchronous learning experiences with social media can encourage collaborative knowledge-building amongst students and offer opportunities for their digital multimodal composing to learn and to express their learning. This understanding can inform researchers on the extent to which the digital medium enables and limits ways of meaning-making. The chapter presents a case for how the affordances of digital tools, such as the popular social media platforms, can be harnessed in the design of meaningful learning experiences.

Learning science involves learning how to use specific, conceptual language in talking, reading and writing for reasoning and problem solving (Lemke, 1990). However, research has argued that language is a major barrier to students learning science (Wellington Osborne 2001). In response, this chapter reports on a project in a Singapore secondary school, where researchers worked with five science teachers at different stages over two years to trial a functional literacy approach to the teaching of lower secondary science. The functional literacy approach was informed by systemic functional theory and drew on the work of (Rose Martin, 2012) and (Rose, 2015) for language learning in the science context. This chapter focuses on the shifts in language awareness for teaching science from the teacher reflections collected during the process of implementing ideas from the functional literacy approach to address students’ needs. The reflections indicated a shift from initial reservations to an eventual recognition of the value of how awareness and attention to language can support students’ learning of scientific concepts, develop communicative classrooms and make the knowledge process visible.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the value of digital technology – in preserving work, play and learning – at a time when physical interactions are constrained. Given the challenges involved in the sudden conscription towards digital teaching and learning, the reception of both teachers and students towards the adoption of digital technologies for home-based teaching and learning has been mixed. While appreciating the affordances of digital technologies in supporting the continuity of teaching during the lockdowns, concerns have been raised by teachers on the effectiveness of digital learning. Our chapter discusses the teacher’s use of semiotic technologies to design learning experiences for students. From the perspective of design considerations, we explore the different ways of meaning making in digital learning – in particular, how knowledge can be represented, pedagogic relations expressed and learning organised through the affordances of semiotic technologies. We do this by studying three types of semiotic technologies, namely, the ubiquitous video lectures, digital games for learning and social media, specifically in its appropriation as a learning platform. Our chapter concludes by reflecting on losses and gains in digital learning and the need for teachers to expand their pedagogical repertoire in the post-pandemic education normal.

This chapter challenges the notion of e-pedagogies and explores what it means for language learning in the Singapore secondary school context. It discusses the reflection of a Singapore English Language teacher in implementing digitally-mediated teaching during the ‘home-based learning’ period amid the pandemic and explores the implications of the experience on the understanding of what e-pedagogies are. During the period of home-based learning, teaching and learning activities were conducted through video-conferencing, learning platforms, and multimedia resources to digitalise the delivery of the lessons. It has been well-recognised that the effectiveness of digitally-mediated learning is not the technologies but how they are used by the teachers as designers of learning. In the Singapore context, some teachers have found it challenging to design effective home-based learning experiences for their students given the lack of training and limited opportunities for teachers to design digitally-mediated learning previously. The experience with home-based learning has highlighted the importance of preparing teachers to design for effective digitally-mediated learning experiences. I problematise the notion of e-pedagogies as a new set of pedagogical practices by highlighting the shared fundamentals of teaching in both the physical classroom and online space. Pedagogies are based on the learning theories of behaviourism and social constructivism, albeit with different pedagogical expressions shaped by the affordances of the medium. This is exemplified with pedagogical approaches, such as the conversational framework and the reflexive pedagogy, which, while promoted by the affordances of teaching in a digital environment, is equally relevant in their application for classroom instruction. Rather than advancing the notion of a unique set of pedagogies for online teaching, understanding the materiality in which the practice is situated and thinking of the entire interaction scenario in which the technologies are embedded can be more productive in drawing out the commonalities in pedagogical principles across media. Such an orientation can allay the teachers’ anxieties towards online teaching and build on, rather than ignore, their deep reservoirs of pedagogical knowledge accumulated from years of experience in classroom instruction.

This chapter adopts multimodal content analysis (Bell, 2001; Joo et al., 2019) to examine an introductory video to an online English course, the textbook accompanying the course, as well as the online course itself, for students in China. The analysis aims to surface the discursive construction and representation of values and the expression of ideologies on English in the English language teaching (ELT) materials (Hu & Mckay, 2014). In particular, the analysis highlights the privileging of Anglocentric representations and dominance of the native speaker model (Kirkpatrick, 2007). Such representations are observed to persist in the Chinese society despite the present status of English as a world language with an increasing number of English language speakers from many parts of the world in the outer circle (Kachru, 1992). Through the analysis, we discuss the expressions of cultural hegemony (Gramsci, 1971), in this case, the western cultural bias implicit in ELT materials propagated to students in China. We advance the argument that such ideological positioning (van Dijk, 2011) of ELT materials is unproductive as such an essentialist definition of EL proficiency is unattainable for non-native speakers (Kirkpatrick, 2007). Even worse, such an association between the English language and nationality can be deleterious as it propagates the unhelpful notion of English where standards and norms are determined by nationality rather than by use.