Foundations Newsletter

Two Dubai Women’s College Foundations teachers presented at the recent 21^st Century Academic Forum/International Conference on Language Learning and Teaching 2014 in Knowledge Village, Dubai.

Richard Peel presented a paper examining how a highly-experienced cohort of EFL teachers in the Gulf had evolved pedagogically since their initial training in the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach. The phenomenological study found that though all teachers had diverged markedly from CLT methodology, nevertheless tenets of CLT pedagogy had been retained.

Kristian Kirkwood presented a paper entitled “Second Language Acquisition through Digital Games”, which examined gamification approaches to motivating students to learn. The pedagogical rationale of utilizing digital games was evaluated, along with specific examples of digital games designed for Arab students preparing for the IELTS test, and games to help Arab learners improve their spelling.

Richard Peel

Kristian Kirkwood