Attention, please! Investigating dynamic reflection as a model for online language teacher training

This project aims to enhance language ALs' online synchronous teaching skills. Teaching languages online synchronously requires careful guidance to establish joint attention between teacher and students (O'Rourke & Stickler, 2017). If students don't know what the teacher wants to emphasise, an online tutorial can result in confusion and anxiety on the learners' part, frustration and impatience on the teacher's. A method to make the attention focus visible is eyetracking, the recording of gaze focus movements while someone engages with content on a screen. Past eyetracking research (Stickler & Shi, 2015; 2017) has found that reflecting together on the attention focus during online language teaching can have a training effect and help teachers develop suitable strategies for online teaching.  

This project proposes to investigate whether this training effect of combining eyetracking visualisation with reflection can be achieved vicariously. We will first select video clips of gazeplots and heatmaps created with eyetracking software that show the attention focus of experienced and less experienced online language teachers. These visualisations will be didactically prepared as self-training elements, adding prompts that stimulate reflection using an iterative, dynamic approach. Further video clips showing the student perspective of attention will be added dynamically to deepen reflection and make teachers aware of the effect of online teaching on learners. The evaluation of AL users of this training model will be collected systematically. If successful, the method can be extended and made available for training purposes across the faculty.