Dan's CALL Blog
An ESL teacher discusses Computer Assisted Language Learning.
Monday, April 29, 2013
iTalki Impressions
Overall, iTalki's focus on interaction is promising for driven language learners. There is little in the way of formal curriculum, as any structure depends entirely on each professional teacher. For those not taking lessons from professional teachers, a lot of motivation and self-discipline would likely be required to make significant advances in language proficiency through the purely social, mutual language exchange experiences that the site facilitates.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
My CALL Portfolio
As an aside, this nice weather we're having almost wants to make me abandon CALL for the much more sun-friendly field of MALL...
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Materials 3: Intercultural Reading and Discussion
The primary CALL tool used in this lesson is LiveBinders, a website that allows users to bundle a variety of web content (including multimedia) to their liking/for their own purposes. Within the LiveBinder, several current articles from a variety of websites are presented for students to read. This serves two purposes: building comfort with digital reading and exposing students to contemporary, nuanced cultural perspectives. Dooey (2008) notes that concerns have been raised regarding the differences between digital reading and paper reading in the field of language assessment, and to that end, this lesson provides experience with authentic digital reading to build student comfort with an increasingly popular mode of reading. With respect to culture, Guth and Helm (2012) note that culture is sometimes reduced to presentation of cultural/national products while often ignoring cultural perspectives, and this lesson seeks to provide students a chance to thoughtfully reflect on perspectives of a contemporary, contentious cultural issue, gay marriage, across several countries, including their own. The lesson also utilizes Wiffiti for a walk-in brainstorm activity that activates background knowledge and offers an initial opportunity for students to share their own thoughts/knowledge on the issue.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Reflection: Computer-Based Language Testing
The Teo article impressed me a lot with the design of her formative inference test used as a treatment over the course of 10 weeks. Teo included a link to a sample from her test, which can be found here. Creating this assessment, to me, feels worthwhile because Teo was able to reach a very large number of students with it and as a low-stakes, formative assessment it could easily be used in future iterations of the course. The test sample was very usable and worked well, too.
The electronic language portfolios described by Cummins and Davense are really interesting. You can check out an EP site used in Europe here. At this point, I feel that work needs to be done on making them more presentable and easily sharable, but the basic components of the portfolios are strong. I also think that they could be used to assist with decision making often left solely to large scale proficiency tests. For example, many universities admit students with a TOEFL score of 70 or higher. However, for a student with a 70 or 71, their true score could lie between, say, 66 and 75 due to the standard error of measurement. For those borderline cases, electronic language portfolios could possibly help with making better admission decisions. If a student is able to show a video of authentic English interaction at an acceptable level (something not represented on the TOEFL, by the way), perhaps that could allow an admissions officer to more confidently admit a student with a 71 whose speaking score was a bit on the low end. Similarly, English medium teaching demonstrations could help with the decision making process for awarding TAships to international graduate students (again, TOEFL scores alone do not indicate someone's proficiency with classroom English).
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Reflection: Teaching Culture
Another interesting point brought up this week was the notion of essentialist versus non-essentialist views of culture. Like Products in the PPP model, essentialist views of culture are most often presented in EFL/ESL materials. "All Americans eat/do/think this" sort of stuff. My foreign language learning experiences have definitely tended to present the target culture along essentialist lines, and frankly, it got to be tiring. In my experience learning Korean, for example, I don't know how many times I read about the same holidays, bowing, using 100% formal speech to talk to older people, drinking rituals, what time of year mothers get together to make kimchi, and how King Sejong invented the Korean alphabet, hangeul. Most of these were things I read on Wikipedia before stepping foot in the country! I felt like it was the equivalent of just hammering ESL/EFL students with stuff about George Washington. While discussing the issue with Turkan, I asked if her English learning experience was ever like that, and lo and behold, it was! :( I feel so sorry for learners who have to hear about American myths like George chopping down a cherry tree. How useless!
I think there's a lot of potential for teaching non-essentialist culture, and doing so in a way that advances students' language ability. Pragmatics, to me, is a natural crossroads for language and culture, and while on the surface it could sometimes appear essentialist (e.g., Americans say please a lot), but the key to pragmatics is using different approaches in different situations, often based on a lot of intertwining factors. By comparing pragmatics between L1 and L2, students can also develop their intercultural competence. Intercultural competence is a topic explored in the Guth & Helm chapter as well as the Liaw (2006) article that Kerry presented, and I came across another article, by Ishihara (2009) recently dealing with instructional treatment and teacher-assessment of pragmatics that also incorporated intercultural comparisons. Students made some pretty deep realizations about the differences between English and Japanese pragmatics as well as increased their general understanding/competence in English pragmatics. It's worth a read if you've got the time; here's the reference:
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Non-essentialist Culture Teaching Activity
Dueling American Perspectives
Purpose: students will understand and compare contemporary American political views. This is important for student understanding of variety in the target culture.
Level: Advanced reading/writing class
Procedure:
1. Select some current event articles from a neutral source (e.g. Reuters)
2. Assign pairs an article and have them find the same story on FoxNews and MSNBC.
3. Ss should be directed to look at differences in how each source portrays the same story (word choice, etc) as well as the content found in the comment sections.
4. Ss will write a short comparison essay or blog post highlighting the different perspectives in the articles and different values they notice in the comments.
-By Turkan and Dan.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Reflection: Writing and Grammar
That's all well and good, but what kind of caught my imagination this week was an additional article that Alan presented: Emergin technologies focusing on form: Tools and strategies by Godwin-Jones (2009). Godwin-Jones presents the idea of an 'intelligent language tutor' (ILT) that abandons the traditional format of CALL grammar instruction. The ILT doesn't have learners filling out forms or doing sentence scrambles, no sir, the ILT prompts students to produce language and then helps them focus on specific forms (targeted forms, forms with errors, overused forms, etc.). I think one of the closest things we have to this right now in ELT is ETS's Criterion, in which learners respond to TOEFL-style prompts and receive some pretty good form-focused feedback from the program.
But what about more interactive, back-and-forth, possibly someday conversational focus on form via CALL? What came to mind that exists now is Cleverbot- an interesting chat bot that's been found to be quite convincing (I think Erin S. mentioned that it passed the Turing test). You may have seen images on the web of humorous exchanges with the Cleverbot, but I think technology like this has more potential than just providing reddit/9gag fodder. Cleverbot is really open-ended, but I could see how more delimited interactions could yield more naturalistic responses- say, tasks asking for directions, or negotiating a movie choice. While simultaneously referencing corpora/a grammar of English, the bot could ask for clarification or give recasts (Google Search style: "Did you mean <something you didn't exactly type>?"). This sort of technology could potentially be beneficial for people without access to face-to-face interaction or lots of language classes, and could be used to train ESP students (tech support, etc.).