Speaker
Description
The positive effects of implementing Reflective Learning activities in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) have been widely reported. However few researchers study how educators design a lesson with learning activities that scaffold students of English as a Second Language (ESL) to reflect on their reading of exemplars. Personas, fictional representations of real users of products, are widely used by educators in developing a lesson plan for teaching students. Holistic Personas, a fictional character with five dimensions (factual, personality, intelligence, knowledge and cognitive process), present users of a learning application can be exemplars for TESOL. Through qualitative action research collective-case study of 65 first-year students and 87 second-year students in Vietnam between 2018 and 2025, we demonstrate how Holistic Personas and Reflective concepts can integrate into a lesson of four types of leaning activities: “experience activities, shared activities, guided activities and independent activities” (Nation & Macalister, 2019) to teach writing skills to students of ESL. Our leaning activities are grounded in Vygotsky’s social constructive learning theory and the Nation & Yamamoto (2012)’s four strands of a balanced language course. Our findings reveal that Holistic Personas are effective exemplars to scaffold reflective learning and to motivate students to learn to write in English every day, outside classrooms, for a period of ten weeks. Reflecting on our experiences we discuss practical implications of our study.
Biography
Hien Minh Thi Tran (Minh Hien) is an educator and a researcher. She has taught students from rural areas in Vietnam since 2017. She has presented academic papers at international conferences and published research papers in international journals in the fields of education, engineering, computing, accounting and management since 1988. She has worked as an educator, a researcher, an author, a systems accountant, a systems manager, an IT consultant, an engineer and, a family business manager and owner. She holds a Master of Education, a Master of Higher Education, a Master of Arts in Creative Writing, a Master of Commerce, a Master of Engineering Science, a Graduate Diploma in Management, a Graduate Conversion Course qualification in Accounting and a Bachelor of Engineering with Honours from Australian universities in NSW, VIC, QLD and TAS. She is currently studying for a Doctor of Education at the University of New South Wales.
Farshid Anvari is a researcher and an educational consultant. He has taught students from rural areas in Vietnam since 2017. He has over 19 years of experience in software engineering and 12 years of experience in power engineering. His research interests include education, personality, user-centered design methodologies, persona ontology. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy and a Master of Philosophy in Computing, a Graduate Diploma of Information Technology, a Graduate Diploma of Science and a Bachelor of Engineering.
