This week, we began surveying web resources available for language teaching. The DuBravac chapter, after it's somewhat patronizing historical background of the web, touched on some resources that I particularly like. Web dictionaries are quite nice for their multimedia capabilities and the format allows for the inclusion of many example sentences, which often aren't available in conventional dictionaries due to length constraints. Corpora were another resource brought up that I quite like, as they are excellent tools for quickly gathering a score of example sentences useful for vocabulary teaching and inductive grammar activities. However, I much prefer having the teacher take the role of corpus curator, carefully selecting material to guide students to discoveries about language rather than deal with the (sometimes extensive) training needed to get a whole class on-board with corpora interfaces and meta-linguistic knowledge required to investigate more independently. One interesting idea that's new to me in the DuBravac chapter is using free surfing in the classroom. I think there is certainly potential for show and tell activities using free surfing in some learning contexts. With the rise of smartphones and tablets, free surfing could be constrained to small time periods and wouldn't require moving the whole class to the computer lab in order to incorporate into larger lessons- free surfing could be a quick warm-up activity ("Alright everyone, you have 5 minutes to find an interesting fact. Be ready to share!").
The Levy (2009) article was a bit disappointing for me. It's surprising how quickly CALL literature can feel out of date (if only slightly). For example, Levy mentioned using Track Changes in MS Word for collaborative writing... it's 2013 now, time to get on the cloud computing train and use Google Docs or Office.com! No one likes playing e-mail tag with multiple draft files. Levy made a somewhat valid point about the "caravan effect" of CALL, warning against moving along from cool watering hole (cool tech resource) to cool watering hole without concern for the journey (learning goals)- while I appreciate the sentiment about keeping focused on learner goals and outcomes, I also have to question whether staying at one watering hole is really worthwhile when bigger and clearer ones come along. In class and in the Levy article, Hot Potatoes came up, and I think in a lot of cases this is a prime example. There are sites such as Memrise, LiveMocha, Quizlet, etc that can accomplish most of the basic task types of Hot Potatoes without a lot of the technical mess (exporting, hosting, etc). However, I will say that Erin S. made a very good point that in less than robust educational settings, where for example internet access might not be pervasive and the institution has a small number of computers in a lab, Hot Potato modules could be developed for institution-wide in-house use, and I could see that being a worthy endeavor.
Reflecting further on the Hot Potato matter, I feel that there is a key point of distinction in CALL tech that we haven't discussed yet: can a teacher utilize and/or develop activities to a sufficient breadth, depth and standard of quality or is greater manpower required? I feel a good example of this was last semester teaching Reading/Vocab at the PIE. Randy initiated the use of MoodleReader.org, a nice site to keep track of students' extensive reading that also provides quizzes on a multitude of graded readers. It took efforts of several people in order to get it off the ground and working properly- Randy did a lot of the initial set up and contacted the webmaster for necessary permissions, Christine (CALL coordinator) set up student logins, Hannaliisa (the Assistant Director, with the help of student workers?) organized books in the library, I made a set of instructions for using the site, and all teachers in the level had to devote class time to familiarizing students with the site. Even if it was only Randy's class that uses MoodleReader, it still likely would've taken more than one person to get things up and running smoothly in an acceptable time frame. Although there were some issues with MoodleReader, I did feel it was useful, but this anecdote clearly highlights the need some resources have for greater support.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Monday, January 28, 2013
Foray into Digital Storytelling
Here is the result of Alan and I playing with www.mixbook.com, a commercial photobook creation site:
Alan and Dan's Story
It's limited to visuals, but it's a pretty intuitive way to put together a little story. Could be really good for kids to make their own storybooks.
Alan and Dan's Story
It's limited to visuals, but it's a pretty intuitive way to put together a little story. Could be really good for kids to make their own storybooks.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Thoughts on CALL evaluation
This week, our topic was evaluating CALL resources. The main takeaway, to me at least, is that a CALL resource ought to be evaluated chiefly for how it fits into learning goals/objectives (in other words, appropriateness). For that reason, I find the Methodological Framework, which focuses on a description of the resource and procedure for using it, and the SLA perspective, which is based on SLA theory and often focuses on specific tasks to be carried out with the resource, the most useful for evaluating CALL resources. Popular checklists, like those offered by the NFLRC and ICT4LT, are, on the positive side, quick and easy to use, but I find them weak for their overemphasis on basic design/logistic aspects of a resource and sparse on their criteria related to appropriateness and practice.
To illustrate, consider the ICT4LT Website Evaluation Form. It includes such questions as "Does the site contain links to other useful sites?" and "How easy is it to navigate the site? Can you easily get back to the site homepage?", which I find to be either irrelevant and/or so basic that they ought to be a given and not significant factor for evaluating how useful a CALL site might be for a given teaching situation. There is little on the checklist related to instruction or learners, and nothing related to theories of language learning or ESL approaches. With so many potential CALL resources out there on the web, and the advance in web design, Web 2.0 functionality, and general reliability of mainstream websites, I feel that CALL evaluation must go beyond basic design and logistic elements and focus much more heavily on theories of SLA and ESL approaches. A site like Duolingo, for example, would get quite a lot of "yes" answers on the ICT4LT Website Evaluation Form, but I would think that most language teaching situations would be hard pressed to justify making the site a significant part of their syllabus.
To illustrate, consider the ICT4LT Website Evaluation Form. It includes such questions as "Does the site contain links to other useful sites?" and "How easy is it to navigate the site? Can you easily get back to the site homepage?", which I find to be either irrelevant and/or so basic that they ought to be a given and not significant factor for evaluating how useful a CALL site might be for a given teaching situation. There is little on the checklist related to instruction or learners, and nothing related to theories of language learning or ESL approaches. With so many potential CALL resources out there on the web, and the advance in web design, Web 2.0 functionality, and general reliability of mainstream websites, I feel that CALL evaluation must go beyond basic design and logistic elements and focus much more heavily on theories of SLA and ESL approaches. A site like Duolingo, for example, would get quite a lot of "yes" answers on the ICT4LT Website Evaluation Form, but I would think that most language teaching situations would be hard pressed to justify making the site a significant part of their syllabus.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Evaluating CALL Resources: Listening at elllo.org
There are a lot of specific and potential CALL resources available, some of which may be useful for your specific teaching situation. However, determining whether or not a particular resource could be effective is not necessarily easy, as many specific CALL resources highlight only their strengths while many potential CALL resources don't publicize uses for language learning. Given the importance of careful selection of a CALL resource, a teacher should evaluate potential resources with some sort of principled criteria. To that end, a few of us in 568 came up with the following criteria for CALL listening resources:
-Content Appropriateness
-Authenticity
-Representation
-Accessibility
-Adaptability
-Engagement
Keeping those criteria in mind, this week I'll be taking a look at www.elllo.org, an ESL listening site with over 1200 passages available for free.
URL: www.elllo.org
Content Appropriateness:
Elllo has a very large library of listening passages, so finding suitable content for just about any student demographic shouldn't be too hard. In general, though, the passages seem to be aimed at learners above the age of 14 (high school and adult learners, but some passages may be suitable for middle school learners). Some topics available, such as relationships, may not be appropriate for all learners, but even in that topic, the passages are quite tame.
Authenticity:
Overall, the passages available on Elllo feel quite authentic. There is quite a variety of genres represented, including news-style reports, interviews, conversations between two or more people, and, in the manner of a television show or documentary, several people offering a brief opinion on a topic. It appears that Elllo keeps some of the speakers on retainer to produce their passages, but even though some topics or interactions might not arise in spontaneous conversation, the manner of delivery is representative of authentic speech- standard rate of speech, intonation, pauses, fillers, and occasional disfluency/repair are all present in the Elllo passage. Variations in passage difficulty (indicated on Elllo) seem mostly according to topic complexity and the depth of discussion rather than overly artificial reductions in rate of speech or extremely careful pronunciation.
Representation:
Representation, in our criteria, refers to the inclusion of various varieties of English, as we believe that restricting students to any one variety for input does no favors. Even for ESL students in say, America, there is a very high likelihood that they would encounter more than one variety of English, and the same holds true for EFL learners as well. In this respect, Elllo really shines: they include speakers from a variety of Inner Circle, Outer Circle, and Expanding Circle countries. In one passage, I found speakers from Croatia, England, Germany, Canada, and the US. Across the site, I found Asian, African, and Latin/South American speakers.
Accessibility:
Elllo has some things going for it in terms of accessibility. First of all, the site is free and doesn't require any sign-ups or logins to access the material. This reduces a considerable burden that many CALL resources demand. Also, the search and categories are quite sensible and make it easy to find desired materials. However, Elllo does have some design issues that make it hard to notice some really great features it has. For example, vocabulary and comprehension quizzes are nestled between ads on the right hand side of listening passages, making them easy to miss. Some of the ad placements, coupled with a lack of borders, could make navigation difficult for students and teachers, wasting time or simply missing out on useful features.
Adaptability:
This is a somewhat fuzzy criteria, but we wanted to take a look at how a CALL resource could be adapted for a variety of purposes. Elllo, due to it's accessibility and large library of passages across topics and proficiency levels, along with features like vocabulary explanations and quizzes for both comprehension and vocab, would seem to have strong adaptability. Since teachers can simply use Elllo passages in their own activities, there is a great deal of possibility for classroom applications as long as you have a computer and speakers in the room. Passages could be used for whole-class activities or assessments, but also, since there are so many passages, a teacher could reasonable find (or let students/groups find) multiple passages that could be utilized in information gap activities or for having a variety of student presentations/summary writings/etc. With the vocabulary building info and quizzes, the site is also suitable for students to work on independently, such as in listening labs or for homework. One problem, though, is that the passage pages also include transcripts, which could deter students from using their listening skills and fall back on reading skills if they run into difficulty when working alone.
Engagement:
Engagement is one area where Elllo may struggle, depending on the group of students. The audio is of middling quality, and for the most part, passages lack video. For the relatively small portion of passages that have video, the video is generally low quality and no-frills in terms of production values. If the topic itself isn't engaging for learners, then there's really nothing else that Elllo offers to make up for it. The exception here is the "Games" category. These passages feature matching questions (i.e. choose the picture that matches what the speaker is describing) throughout that must be answered to continue, and I think this level of interactivity could be engaging for students working independently.
Overall, I find Elllo to be valuable for it's expansive library and ease of use for teachers and learners. From experience, I can say that Elllo is successful in classroom activities and can provide useful material for classroom assessments.
-Content Appropriateness
-Authenticity
-Representation
-Accessibility
-Adaptability
-Engagement
Keeping those criteria in mind, this week I'll be taking a look at www.elllo.org, an ESL listening site with over 1200 passages available for free.
URL: www.elllo.org
Content Appropriateness:
Elllo has a very large library of listening passages, so finding suitable content for just about any student demographic shouldn't be too hard. In general, though, the passages seem to be aimed at learners above the age of 14 (high school and adult learners, but some passages may be suitable for middle school learners). Some topics available, such as relationships, may not be appropriate for all learners, but even in that topic, the passages are quite tame.
Authenticity:
Overall, the passages available on Elllo feel quite authentic. There is quite a variety of genres represented, including news-style reports, interviews, conversations between two or more people, and, in the manner of a television show or documentary, several people offering a brief opinion on a topic. It appears that Elllo keeps some of the speakers on retainer to produce their passages, but even though some topics or interactions might not arise in spontaneous conversation, the manner of delivery is representative of authentic speech- standard rate of speech, intonation, pauses, fillers, and occasional disfluency/repair are all present in the Elllo passage. Variations in passage difficulty (indicated on Elllo) seem mostly according to topic complexity and the depth of discussion rather than overly artificial reductions in rate of speech or extremely careful pronunciation.
Representation:
Representation, in our criteria, refers to the inclusion of various varieties of English, as we believe that restricting students to any one variety for input does no favors. Even for ESL students in say, America, there is a very high likelihood that they would encounter more than one variety of English, and the same holds true for EFL learners as well. In this respect, Elllo really shines: they include speakers from a variety of Inner Circle, Outer Circle, and Expanding Circle countries. In one passage, I found speakers from Croatia, England, Germany, Canada, and the US. Across the site, I found Asian, African, and Latin/South American speakers.
Accessibility:
Elllo has some things going for it in terms of accessibility. First of all, the site is free and doesn't require any sign-ups or logins to access the material. This reduces a considerable burden that many CALL resources demand. Also, the search and categories are quite sensible and make it easy to find desired materials. However, Elllo does have some design issues that make it hard to notice some really great features it has. For example, vocabulary and comprehension quizzes are nestled between ads on the right hand side of listening passages, making them easy to miss. Some of the ad placements, coupled with a lack of borders, could make navigation difficult for students and teachers, wasting time or simply missing out on useful features.
Adaptability:
This is a somewhat fuzzy criteria, but we wanted to take a look at how a CALL resource could be adapted for a variety of purposes. Elllo, due to it's accessibility and large library of passages across topics and proficiency levels, along with features like vocabulary explanations and quizzes for both comprehension and vocab, would seem to have strong adaptability. Since teachers can simply use Elllo passages in their own activities, there is a great deal of possibility for classroom applications as long as you have a computer and speakers in the room. Passages could be used for whole-class activities or assessments, but also, since there are so many passages, a teacher could reasonable find (or let students/groups find) multiple passages that could be utilized in information gap activities or for having a variety of student presentations/summary writings/etc. With the vocabulary building info and quizzes, the site is also suitable for students to work on independently, such as in listening labs or for homework. One problem, though, is that the passage pages also include transcripts, which could deter students from using their listening skills and fall back on reading skills if they run into difficulty when working alone.
Engagement:
Engagement is one area where Elllo may struggle, depending on the group of students. The audio is of middling quality, and for the most part, passages lack video. For the relatively small portion of passages that have video, the video is generally low quality and no-frills in terms of production values. If the topic itself isn't engaging for learners, then there's really nothing else that Elllo offers to make up for it. The exception here is the "Games" category. These passages feature matching questions (i.e. choose the picture that matches what the speaker is describing) throughout that must be answered to continue, and I think this level of interactivity could be engaging for students working independently.
Overall, I find Elllo to be valuable for it's expansive library and ease of use for teachers and learners. From experience, I can say that Elllo is successful in classroom activities and can provide useful material for classroom assessments.
Monday, January 14, 2013
SuperCALLifragilisticexpeallidocious
Welcome to Dan's CALL Blog!
I'm Dan Isbell, currently a graduate student at Northern Arizona University and a graduate teaching assistant at the Program in Intensive English. I've also taught for over two years in South Korea. In this blog, I'll be commenting on topics in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and working on developing a repertoire of technological tools for future teaching endeavors.
While I wouldn't necessarily consider myself a connoisseur of CALL, I do have some experience using technology in the classroom. In laundry-list form, here's a brief rundown of tools I've used:
-Voxopop for speaking homework (meaningful sentences, etc.)
-Blogs for reading assignments and commenting
-Interactive Textbooks for classroom instruction
-Using recorders in class for speaking activities
-MoodleReader for tracking extensive reading
As a language learner myself, I've used other computer based resources:
-Anki flashcards (for vocabulary learning)
-LiveMocha (flashcards, asynchronous feedback on writing/speaking prompts)
-GoogleDocs (collaborative construction of scripts, etc)
In this course I hope to learn more about evaluating the usefulness of tech tools for language learning. I think there's a big gap between what sounds really awesome and what actually works, not to mention what works effectively enough to be worth the trouble. I'm also concerned with the sheer number of tools that could be used, and to that end I want to learn guidelines on how to effectively manage the use of computer-based tools in a language class.
I'm particularly interested in learning how more mainstream tools and applications (e.g. Google, facebook, skype, etc.) can be incorporated into language teaching, as there's really nothing more relevant to out-of-class language use. I'm also curious about using smart devices in the classroom- I'd rather embrace the future than become a phone-confiscating curmudgeon before I'm 30.
I'm Dan Isbell, currently a graduate student at Northern Arizona University and a graduate teaching assistant at the Program in Intensive English. I've also taught for over two years in South Korea. In this blog, I'll be commenting on topics in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and working on developing a repertoire of technological tools for future teaching endeavors.
While I wouldn't necessarily consider myself a connoisseur of CALL, I do have some experience using technology in the classroom. In laundry-list form, here's a brief rundown of tools I've used:
-Voxopop for speaking homework (meaningful sentences, etc.)
-Blogs for reading assignments and commenting
-Interactive Textbooks for classroom instruction
-Using recorders in class for speaking activities
-MoodleReader for tracking extensive reading
As a language learner myself, I've used other computer based resources:
-Anki flashcards (for vocabulary learning)
-LiveMocha (flashcards, asynchronous feedback on writing/speaking prompts)
-GoogleDocs (collaborative construction of scripts, etc)
In this course I hope to learn more about evaluating the usefulness of tech tools for language learning. I think there's a big gap between what sounds really awesome and what actually works, not to mention what works effectively enough to be worth the trouble. I'm also concerned with the sheer number of tools that could be used, and to that end I want to learn guidelines on how to effectively manage the use of computer-based tools in a language class.
I'm particularly interested in learning how more mainstream tools and applications (e.g. Google, facebook, skype, etc.) can be incorporated into language teaching, as there's really nothing more relevant to out-of-class language use. I'm also curious about using smart devices in the classroom- I'd rather embrace the future than become a phone-confiscating curmudgeon before I'm 30.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)