Constructing In Competence

Competence and incompetence are constructs that emerge in the social milieu of everyday life. Individuals are continually making and revising judgments about each other's abilities as they interact. The flexible, situated view of competence conveyed by the research of the authors in this volume is a departure from the way that competence is usually thought about in the fields of communication disabilities and education. In the social constructivist view, competence is not a fixed mass, residing within an individual, or a fixed judgment, defined externally. Rather, it is variable, sensitive to what is going on in the here and now, and coconstructed by those present. Constructions of competence are tied to evaluations implicit in the communication of the participants as well as to explicit evaluations of how things are going. The authors address the social construction of competence in a variety of situations: engaging in therapy for communication and other disorders, working and living with people with disabilities, speaking a second language, living with deafness, and giving and receiving instruction. Their studies focus on adults and children, including those with disabilities (aphasia, traumatic brain injury, augmentative systems users), as they go about managing their lives and identities. They examine the all-important context in which participants make competence judgments, assess the impact of implicit judgments and formal diagnoses, and look at the types of evaluations made during interaction. This book makes an argument all helping professionals need to hear: institutional, clinical, and social practices promoting judgments must be changed to practices that are more positive and empowering.

This book examines the various areas of mathematics education and neighboring disciplines that have recently contributed to a better understanding of the still vague construct of diagnostic competence. The work addresses the nature, development and effect of diagnostic competence in mathematics instruction, with a focus on the professional development of teachers.

The volume provides current methodological insights into translation didactics. It investigates both theoretical and practical aspects of translator training with a view to exchanging knowledge and resources among those who contribute to the complex and challenging endeavour of constructing translation competence.

Ten Steps to Complex Learning presents a path from a training problem to a training solution in a way that students, practitioners (both instructional designers and teachers), and researchers can understand and easily use. Practitioners can use this book as a reference guide to support their design of courses, materials, or environments for complex learning. Students in the field of instructional design can use this book to broaden their knowledge of the design of training programs for complex learning. Now fully revised to incorporate the most current research in the field, this second edition of Ten Steps to Complex Learning includes user-friendly examples and case studies, and demonstrates the application of the ten steps in relation to the design of serious games, learning networks, social media, and new developments in educational neuroscience.

Pragmatics Pedagogy in English as an International Language aims to bring to light L2 pragmatics instruction and assessment in relation to English as an International Language (EIL). The chapters in this book deal with a range of pedagogically related topics, including the historical interface between L2 pragmatics and EIL, reconceptualization of pragmatic competence in EIL, intercultural dimension of pragmatics pedagogy in EIL, teacher pragmatic awareness of instruction in the context of EIL, pragmatics of politeness in EIL, pragmatic teaching materials for EIL pedagogy, teachers’ and scholars’ perceptions of pragmatics pedagogy in EIL, assessment and assessment criteria in EIL-aware pragmatics, and methods for research into pragmatics in EIL. This book is different from other books about both EIL pedagogy and pragmatics pedagogy. Exploring the interface between different dimensions of pragmatics pedagogy and EIL, it suggests instructional and assessment tasks for EIL-aware pedagogy and directions for research on EIL-based pragmatics pedagogy. Pragmatics Pedagogy in English as an International Language will be useful for a range of readers who have an interest in the pragmatics instruction and assessment of EIL as well as those whose main area of specialization is EIL but would like to know how EIL, with its rich conceptual and empirical background, can go beyond linguistic instruction to embrace the instruction of pragmatic competence.

This book explores the effectiveness of listen-to-summarize tasks as a tool to assess lecture comprehension ability. It especially focuses on listen-to-summarize tasks that represent listeners’ meaning building and the discourse construction of the lecture for listening assessment purposes. It discusses in depth the nature of lecture comprehension and introduces the approaches to assessing it. It also presents teachers’ and students’ perceptions of listen-to-summarize task demands and their respective implications. By observing interactions between test-takers’ cognitive processes and the task itself, the book explores the effectiveness of these tasks. It also examines the discrepancy in cognitive processes between different language competence levels in detail, shedding light upon current research on lecture comprehension assessment and offering insights into listening comprehension instruction.

This volume features the latest research findings on L2 interactional competence to demonstrate the potential for developing and implementing research-based pedagogy that targets interactional competence (IC) in early instruction in a variety of L2 learning and teaching contexts. Incorporating contributions from both leading and emerging researchers in the area, the book is organized into four sections to provide a systematic account of interactional competence, defined as a set of skills required to co-construct an effective interaction with a variety of interlocutors in a variety of settings, and advocates for IC to be part of a well-rounded curriculum of L2 instruction. The volume provides a comprehensive overview of the different theoretical perspectives on IC within Conversation Analysis, and moves into a discussion of conversation-analytic research findings from a variety of contexts and of their pedagogical implications.The book then presents examples of pedagogy in practice and also illustrates the potential for implementing IC in testing settings. This volume makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature on interactional competence and will be of particular interest to graduate students and researchers in applied linguistics, SLA, language education, curriculum and instruction studies, and educational linguistics. Chapter 13 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Medical competence is a hot topic surrounded by much controversy about how to define competency, how to teach it, and how to measure it. While some debate the pros and cons of competence-based medical education and others explain how to achieve various competencies, the authors of the seven chapters in The Question of Competence offer something very different. They critique the very notion of competence itself and attend to how it has shaped what we pay attention to—and what we ignore—in the education and assessment of medical trainees. Two leading figures in the field of medical education, Brian D. Hodges and Lorelei Lingard, drew together colleagues from the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands to explore competency from different perspectives, in order to spark thoughtful discussion and debate on the subject. The critical analyses included in the book’s chapters cover the role of emotion, the implications of teamwork, interprofessional frameworks, the construction of expertise, new directions for assessment, models of self-regulation, and the concept of mindful practice. The authors juxtapose the idea of competence with other highly valued ideas in medical education such as emotion, cognition and teamwork, drawing new insights about their intersections and implications for one another.