Elaboración Práctica del Estado de Flujo de Efectivo

Continuing professional development (CPD) is important for any professional. However, for FLTs it plays a pivotal role in securing and maintaining employment.

CPD “gives me a chance to broaden knowledge & acquire key skills I can offer in the market” (M., questionnaire), enables FLTs “to offer a top quality service” to clients (W., questionnaire) and to stay competitive “when I cannot compete on price with newer, less experienced teachers.” (Marc, questionnaire).

Tweet and hashtag assemblages, which often include hyperlinks, connect FLTs with a plethora of information pertaining to language teaching materials, language teaching methods, and research on language teaching and learning: “I can read everything from academic articles to short tweets with others' opinions.” (Heather, questionnaire). Overall, reading was mentioned as important for FLTs’ PD by nine questionnaire respondents. Through tweet and hashtag assemblages FLTs also connect to the latest developments in the language teaching industry, because “keeping abreast of new developments is vital!” (E.; questionnaire). Tweets can be performative for opening up teaching by providing “access to a wider range of ideas than I would have access to in my immediate teaching context.” (E. questionnaire). However, sometimes tweets and hashtag assemblages do not work with teaching practices. A questionnaire respondent wrote: [I have been] “trying to find ideas for material, but haven't had any luck so far.” (A1, questionnaire). Another respondent wrote “I have been thinking on using Twitter for professional purposes but I haven't designed a proper strategy yet.” (A3, questionnaire).

Tweets from research participants showed that the information they tweeted often came from newspaper or journal articles or from (other FLTs’) blog posts. Five questionnaire respondents mentioned reading blogs as a source of informal PD. In some cases, third-party applications, such as Klout, were used to find content for their own tweets, which became apparent from the hyperlinks in tweets. Klout, a service that stopped operation in 2018, measured users’ social media influence, based on

information that included the number of Twitter followings and followers and the number of retweets. This service also provided information on user interactions with the content posted on social media. Hyperlinks in tweet assemblages are performative: they connect humans and information on and beyond Twitter in complex and dynamic ways, enabling the production of measurements of user behaviour and content value (depending on user-content interactions).

Information is further disseminated on Twitter by retweeting, and becomes more valuable if a retweet is accompanied by a personal recommendation. Tweet examples across all five hashtag networks include “Useful!”, “You should read this!” or “I found this interesting!”. Retweets accounted for most of the tweets that were collected from the six research participants. In some cases tweets were retweeted with a new hashtag, such as #edtech (educational technology), enabling new rhizomatic movement and new connections: “…particularly with retweets, somebody will retweet something by somebody I don’t follow, and then that leads me to think ‘Oh, that’s interesting!’, and then I start following them.” (Rachel, interview).

Tweet assemblagescan also work as “a chance to reflect on my teaching” (M., questionnaire). Marc provided the example of a tweet conversation with another language teacher which shaped his vocabulary teaching:

“I find things through Twitter that I probably would never have thought of […] like my own preconceptions being perhaps wrong. An example of this would be maybe how I teach vocabulary, and another teacher said, ‘Actually, it’s been researched on – this teaching vocabulary in sets isn’t so effective’. So one other possibility could be to teach it in context, avoiding lexical sets and avoiding synonyms.” (Marc, interview).

Sometimes reflection occurs much later than a tweet was sent, through

connections between tweet assemblages and other assemblages: “No, but other things […] pop into your head…oh yeah, that was something I read some months ago, that might be relevant in this particular moment.” (Heather, interview). “Twitter tells me to reflect on things, sometimes even weeks after an event. There’s a lot about Twitter on my blog as well.” (Marc, interview).

Another example was provided by Hanna, who had tweeted about her teaching experience with the software Quizlet in a #ELTchat Twitter chat, where vocabulary learning was discussed. In her interview she explained that she had learnt about Quizlet on Twitter and that she set up a Quizlet classroom for each class or for individual students (in her one-to-one teaching) as a “way of capturing the words” (Hanna, interview) that were used in the classroom. Before she introduced Quizlet in her teaching Hanna found that the (students’) words used during teaching were often “lost” (Hanna, interview) after a lesson. After each lesson Hanna added English words, and in some cases the Czech translation, and then shared it with her students, as “it’s their work. I did part of the work, and now they have to do the work.” (Hanna, interview). During the lessons Hanna kept referring to the Quizlet resource and found that “students know their vocabulary and are more confident using it” (Hanna, interview). In this example tweet assemblages connected with teaching and learning practices and a software to produce a vocabulary learning resource, which in itself could be regarded as assemblage.

Tweeting and language teaching also become entangled when a language

teachers’ Twitter timeline is embedded in an institutional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). Rachel, who took a special interest in the origin of English words, created a separate hashtag for her teaching:

“I am teaching a module called ‘The English language in the 21st

century’. So as part of my teaching I’m drawing my students’ attention to language in newspapers, dictionaries and so on. I mean a lot of this is part of my teaching; it’s not just like personal relevant” (Rachel, interview).

Rachel’s students were not obliged to join Twitter, but some chose to follow Rachel on Twitter and provided her with tweet content: “This student that I taught last year, he now sometimes sends me things that might be interesting, and I think I’d like to build this up a little bit more.” (Rachel, interview). The rhizomatic movements of tweet and hashtag assemblages on and beyond Twitter co-construct the classroom teaching and open up the classroom for student explorations. At the same time the Twitter connections and tweet and hashtag assemblages are performative in constructing a different teacher-student relationship:

“[Twitter ] works for me in trying to reach out to some of my students and maybe connect with them […], and be able to make those

relationships in a kind of different way than through some of the formal university procedures.” (Rachel, interview).

Tweet and hashtag assemblages are performative in showcasing the variety of language teachers’ work, which may also include other work, e.g. as an author,

conference presenter or webinar moderator, and their “enthusiasm” (Rachel, interview) for their subject. However, finding and sharing information is also performative for “publicising” (E., questionnaire) FLTs’ work and for increasing FLTs’ value as a useful contact. Laura reported in the interview that she tries to tweet content that is interesting for the people she is connected with, but she also seeks to increase her visibility: “I also

use my Twitter to give myself a good image for my online teaching business - posting photos etc” (Laura, questionnaire). During the data collection time Laura changed her Twitter handle, because she thought “that using my real name would help people I meet in real life or in other situations to find me online” (Laura, interview).