The Future of Education

Palaver Tree is considered in West African oral history as a socio-political group-centered and negotiation-based tool especially used in the decision-making to solve problems (Ellis, Bruckmann 2001). Within technology-enhanced collaborative learning, students are expected to discursively negotiate opinions, concepts, or meanings differing from their own. Therefore, negotiation has become a central issue in research on the effectiveness of computer-supported collaborative learning (Beers 2007). The present paper is situated in the context of socio-cognitive aspects of language processing and computer-supported collaborative knowledge acquisition (Dillenbourg et al. 2009; Vygotsky 1978). The study examines the following: Do negotiated interactions in collaborative learning with grammar animations lead to better learning scores than non-negotiated interactions? The study is conducted according to a randomized control-group pretest-posttest design. This includes the evaluation of short- and long-term learner scores in the use of grammatical rules. Participants in the learning settings are 133 German learners, distributed in 35 different countries. An external collaboration script was designed and used in the experimental group to orchestrate the negotiated interactions (Compaoré 2019; Fischer et al. 2013). The grammar animations used were designed and tested in a previous study to teach two-ways prepositions to German as a Foreign Language learners. The collaborative learning settings took place in a predesigned virtual learning classroom called vitero (virtual team room), developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering IAO. The findings contribute to the ongoing practical debate on the relevance (or otherwise) of instructional guidance in technology-enhanced collaborative language teaching.

Keywords: Palaver-Tree, Computer-supported Collaboration Script, Negotiation of Meaning, German Grammar Teaching, Virtual Classroom.

References:
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