USERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF BLENDED SPACES AND FUTURE CHALLENGES TO PEDAGOGY: A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH TO TWITTER COMMUNICATION DURING THE PANDEMIC
Diogo Jasmins
University of Évora, Portugal, CEL-UÉ
Abstract
The 2020-2022 global pandemic changed what professors and students understood as being the prototypical example of a classroom environment in the context of formal instruction (Rosch 1975), which was limited to four walls in institutional settings such as schools, high schools or universities. The type of communication in these pedagogic settings (Bernstein 1996, Moss 2000) that was characterised by face-to-face interactions (Goffman 1967) was suddenly shifted to include remote teaching/learning contexts beyond the classroom setting during the lockdowns. Interactions took place via digital tools, such as computer-mediated communication (Herring 2004), as well as tools such as cameras, screens, microphones and emails that were used for various purposes. Following conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier, & Turner 2002), this research departed from the challenges faced by interlocutors in a hybrid medium of instruction. Both the multiple interactions occurring in class (in presentia) and those observed in an online class have forced interlocutors to change their pedagogical methodologies. This exploratory and empirical study benefits from corpus linguistic tools, namely script-integrated Google Sheets (for the corpus collection) and WordSmith Tools 7 (for the corpus analysis). Setting up a scripted Google Sheet to automatically collect a Twitter corpus (Burgess, & Baym 2020) enabled all the posted tweets containing the content words class and learning to be collected. The corpus consists of 1 118 939 tweets (44 864 388 tokens). Following a discourse-based approach (Baker 2006) to conceptual blending theory, input spaces were created based on the context words remote learning and in-person learning to reveal problems that could be considered to be emergent, but which were entrenched in these input spaces (Fauconnier, & Turner 2002), particularly uncertainty, anxiety, protection, danger and inclusion. The hypothesis that the challenges to the future of pedagogy were already being created and discussed in the present, and that conceptual blending theory could identify issues that were being entrenched in communities before they become noticeable challenges for the wider society, was proposed. Overall, the research conclusion was that the practices of active listening, critical reading, meaningful participation and reflective student feedback (Sousa, & Dragoescu 2019), as well as the establishment of routines and the development of study habits, posed challenges. Inequalities became clearer due to COVID-19 pandemic, which was considered to be the perpetrator that challenged pedagogy, and the pedagogical community placed all its stress on children, who felt lost in an unknown environment and needed solutions.
Keywords: Pandemic; Pedagogy; Conceptual blending theory; Twitter; Corpus-based approach.
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How to cite this paper: Jasmins, D. (2022). Users’ perceptions of blended spaces and future challenges to pedagogy: A corpus-based approach to Twitter communication during the pandemic. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education – JoLIE, 15(1), 61–80. https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2022.15.1.4
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