Student-Teachers’ Growth in Pedagogic and Language Awareness as Managers of a Collaborative Online Annotation Platform

Abstract

<p>Situated within the context of English language teacher education at a university in Hong Kong, the paper documents a teacher-educator’s (re)new(ed) pedagogies gleaned from a four-year journey searching for innovative online teaching practices amid the pandemic. Specifically, it highlights classroom-proven practices adopted to maximise the affordances of Perusall, a collaborative online annotation platform (COAP), to achieve the prime goal of enhancing (student-)teachers’ metalinguistic awareness in a Master of Education course Language Awareness: Grammar and Lexis. This qualitative study collected data from multiple sources: web-based interaction among students, artefacts of students’ work, oral and written reflections on their learning experiences, and the teacher-educator’s observational notes. Findings based on a thematic analysis indicated two critical determinants of teaching-and-learning effectiveness on the COAP: the teacher-educator’s ‘retooling’ of the Perusall functionalities (Tsui & Tavares, 2021) and empowerment of students as ‘Perusall Managers’ (PMs) on the platform (Tavares, 2021, 2022, 2023). It elucidates how the teacher-educator reconceptualises the COAP as a communal space for professional dialogues led by PMs in the pre-, while- and post-course stages while co-constructing a ‘negotiated curriculum’ (Boomer et al., 2005; Edwards, 2011; Yuksel, 2010) and student-generated assessment rubrics with them. How the students, who are pre- and in-service teachers of English, were nurtured to be grammar ‘experts’ and material analysts (Tavares, 2023) will be examined. The study results shed light on ways of addressing the challenges of using COAPs. Teachers’ role in promoting technology-enhanced learning using COAPs in the post-pandemic digital age will also be discussed.<br></p>